Secrets Under the Sun

by Nadia Marks

  Tired from their journey and a little emotional, the three friends agreed to meet in the lobby after a couple of hours’ rest for an early-evening stroll in search of a suitable place to dine.

  ‘I think our first destination should be the American Bar for a cocktail,’ Adonis had told the girls, squeezed together in the tiny art nouveau lift on the way up to their rooms.

  ‘Perfect!’ they both agreed.

  They couldn’t remember the last time the three of them had been on a trip together somewhere. The last time had probably been to Athens, so long ago now. It was after Eleni had graduated from the London School of Economics, and she had arranged to meet the others in the Greek capital for a few days on her way to Cyprus. She had wanted to tell them that she had agreed to marry Simon and felt the need to break the news to them first, before announcing it back home. She and Simon were fellow students and had been together for a couple of years. She hadn’t anticipated the relationship would turn out to be permanent, which meant she’d be staying in London after they got married. Anxious about the prospect of disappointing Katerina by not returning to Larnaka after her studies, and aware of her aunt’s antipathy towards the English, she looked for support from her beloved Adonis and Marianna. ‘They love you and they want what’s best for you,’ Marianna told her. ‘It’s not every English person’s fault what the British did to Cyprus all those years ago. It’s forgotten now.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Adonis had agreed. ‘Besides, my mother and Tante have Grandmother Olga to deal with,’ Adonis joked. ‘She will put them right.’

  This trip to Vienna, which Robert had been right to suggest, was already having a similar healing effect to the Athens trip long before. The circumstances were less happy than on the previous one, but together they felt capable of dealing with whatever crisis they had to face.

  ‘Which side of the bed would you rather sleep on?’ Eleni asked Marianna, kicking off her shoes and flopping on the big double bed, once they were in their room. ‘I hope you’re not going to snore,’ she continued teasingly.

  ‘Excuse me, madam!’ Marianna protested, laughing, and flopped down next to her. ‘As I remember it, you’re the one who snores and talks in your sleep!’

  It had been a long time since they had shared a room, let alone a bed. A sense of well-being washed over them; this felt like old times.

  They found Adonis already in the lobby chatting with the concierge, a map of the city opened up on the counter as he took down notes.

  ‘Hans here says that there is a superb restaurant on our doorstep.’ He looked up at Eleni and Marianna as they stood looking over his shoulder.

  ‘The Apfelbaum is very good, probably the best restaurant in town,’ Hans told them in perfect English. ‘It’s been open for only a few months, we highly recommend it to our guests, but it is best you book.’

  ‘Where is it?’ the girls said in unison.

  ‘Just behind the wall, through the gate,’ he replied.

  The gate in the wall, if fully opened, would have allowed access to a horse and carriage when it was first built. Adonis pushed the half-open door and walking through he entered a courtyard, followed closely by the girls. Oddly nervous as if they were trespassing they hesitated for a moment before venturing further into a little piazza flanked on all sides by a four-storey building.

  The courtyard in which they found themselves was so familiar, so recognizable, that it stopped them in their tracks. Blinking in disbelief they stood looking around them.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Eleni was the first to speak. ‘Looook!’ she gasped, pointing ahead and bringing her hand to her mouth.

  ‘It’s still here!’ Adonis breathed.

  ‘The … the tree …’ Marianna started to say but her voice trailed off.

  The apple tree stood in the middle of the little garden, now reduced to a fenced-off patch of green, leaving the rest of the square to be used as a car park for the residents. This, they instantly knew, was the courtyard of Grashofgasse of long ago, the place they had come to Vienna to find. The apple tree was a giveaway, even if all that remained from the floral garden were several rose bushes which competed for space with the tree. The four-storey apartments wrapped themselves around the entire square, just as Adonis, Eleni and Marianna had seen in the old family photograph albums. They stepped further into the yard and stood looking up. A sign read ‘1010 Wien, Grashofgasse Wohnung’. On the third floor on the right-hand side, they were sure they could locate Great-aunt Heidi’s home and above that they could see a roof garden, tufts of greenery spilling over the tiles; someone was apparently continuing Nicos and Sonia’s work.

  ‘This is where you two were born!’ Marianna suddenly shouted the words, shaking them all out of their reverie. Blinking again, Adonis and Eleni looked at each other; their knees seemed to go weak and a sudden fatigue took hold, demanding that they sit down. Across the way on the ground floor with its welcoming doors flung open was the Apfelbaum restaurant that Hans had recommended. Several tables and chairs spilled into the yard, and a big sun umbrella and potted plants signalled that the small area in front of the restaurant was its property. The three made their way to one of the tables and dropped on the chairs in a state of emotional exhaustion, stunned at their unexpected discovery.

  ‘I think we need a drink,’ Adonis said, calling the waiter who was making his way to them.

  ‘I had a feeling this must have been it when I saw the address of the hotel,’ he said looking around him, ‘but I thought it was too good to be true.’

  ‘After this past week nothing should surprise us any more,’ Eleni said.

  ‘It’s incredible how we found it – no one will ever believe the coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m thinking …’ Marianna hesitated. ‘Who knows …’ she started again, ‘it was probably Tante and Grandma Olga who guided us here.’

  ‘Who knows indeed,’ Eleni said, looking up, and lifted her glass of wine towards the apartment. ‘Here’s to you, Olga, Katerina, Anita and Sonia, we salute your loyalty to each other, and marvel at your courage. You’re all a hard act to follow!’

  As it turned out, on that first night in Vienna they ended up sitting under the stars in the Apfelbaum restaurant, whose name they learned meant ‘apple tree’, unable to tear themselves away. It was a warm and balmy evening and they sat in the square eating and drinking and basking in the pleasure of their happy discovery until it was time to take themselves off to bed.

  They were still having breakfast when Robert arrived. Tall, black and handsome, he cut an impressive figure and turned everybody’s head as he walked into the dining room. At the sight of him all three jumped up, overturning at least one empty coffee cup and noisily threw their arms around him, causing further curious looks from the other guests.

  Robert’s presence brought a sort of calm to their febrile state of mind as always, and he willingly spent the day listening again to all they had to say. Even though he knew most of it from Adonis, the revelations of the past days needed more discussing. Robert himself had had his share of family complications when at the age of sixteen he’d discovered that his biological father was not the man who’d brought him up.

  ‘Who hasn’t had their share of family secrets?’ he pointed out, as they sat drinking coffee in the Café Central later that afternoon. He looked around the table at everyone. ‘It takes time to get over them, and in my case therapy too, but the good news is you do get over them. That I promise.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking …’ Adonis hesitated for a moment. ‘I was wondering,’ he tried again, ‘if I should look for him.’ He searched Robert’s face for a reaction. ‘You know … try to find out if he’s alive?’

  Robert let out a sigh and reached for Adonis’s hand. ‘I didn’t go looking for my father because I knew he was already dead, but you have no idea. So I think you should do whatever you feel the need to do. I wish I’d had that opportunity.’

  ‘I had a dream last night,’ Adonis continue
d, swallowing hard to stop his tears, ‘and I’ve been thinking about it all day. I dreamt of him. The way he was when we were young when he used to come and visit us at the house.’ He looked at the girls. ‘I dreamt that he was standing in the kitchen with Tante, and I called out to him; he turned to look at me and I ran into his open arms. I called out “Father,” but in my dream I didn’t know if I was calling him Father as in Padre, or father … as in my father. I woke up crying.’

  ‘I have these dreams about my mother all the time,’ Marianna said in a tiny voice, her eyes filling up. ‘I’m always running into her open arms but when I get there she has vanished …’

  ‘I have these dreams about my parents,’ Eleni said, ‘but the difference between you two and me is that my parents are both dead and I will never find them.’ Eleni took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and carried on. ‘But you, Marianna mou and you, Adonis mou, you both have a chance of looking for your mother and father. Since your mama hasn’t come to find you then perhaps it’s time you tried to find her … and you, my darling cousin, your father was never going to look for you because he has no idea who you are.’

  The Natural History Museum of Vienna was grand, and majestic enough to have been a palace built for kings and queens; instead it housed old bones, fossils, dead animals and plants. But then again many buildings they encountered in the Austrian capital as they explored it looked grand enough to be palaces.

  This time it was Adonis who came up with the idea they should visit the museum in search of their great-grandparents’ botanical work. They had been so caught up with the discovery of the apartments that they had almost forgotten that this was the city where their ancestors came from and their story had begun, and that the museum itself was the reason why Josef and Eva left their country to go to Cyprus and start a new life there.

  Adonis telephoned ahead of time to make an appointment and explain the purpose of their request, so when they arrived they were warmly greeted by a museum official who was to take them to the archive room.

  ‘I believe your relatives contributed an important body of work to the museum,’ the man said as he ushered them up magnificent staircases leading to rooms of gothic splendour full of cabinets containing a host of extinct species, some in bottles or glass dressers, dinosaurs on plinths, and prehistoric bones on display. He whisked them through room after room, and they resolved to revisit at their leisure once their tour was complete. Finally, they arrived at the archive room. In contrast to the elaborate palace of a museum they had just been through, this was a modest chamber whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with shelves full of files and storage boxes. Apparently modernity and technology had not yet reached the museum’s archive collections.

  ‘You probably think we are still in the nineteenth century,’ Professor Buchsbaum laughed apologetically after introducing himself. ‘Of course,’ he explained, ‘we electronically record our collections too, but here we have the physical specimens and artworks which we must preserve. Works like those of your great-great-grandparents are fragile and must be protected. As you see,’ he pointed at the rows and rows of shelves along the length of the room, ‘there is so much material, since the museum opened in 1889 the collections are constantly growing.’ He gestured around again. ‘Josef and Eva Linser, your relatives, are two of our most valued contributors from the early days. They were among the first botanists to have been sent abroad for the purpose of collecting flora and fauna around the world for the museum – as you will see.’ He signalled to one of his colleagues to join them.

  ‘Many of Eva Linser’s illustrations are in the museum,’ the man informed them as he shook their hands, ‘but here you will be able to examine them more closely.’

  Lost for words, Eleni, Marianna, Adonis and Robert stood looking and listening in awe, while the professor began to explain and lay out with the utmost care, botanical documents and artworks that had been compiled and created over a century ago by two people so closely connected to them yet who had been so unfamiliar to them. In this room of antiquities and in these objects of beauty and rarity lay part of their own history. Objects that had travelled for thousands of miles from a land of sun and sea, and were as primitive as if they had come from another planet.

  Arms linked, leaning over a counter that ran along the entire length of the archive room, the four friends continued to look in wonderment at beautiful, exquisite illustrations, botanical specimens as delicate as lace, preserved for posterity.

  Names hand-written on cards by Josef and Eva categorized each rare species of flower and plant, names as elusive and enchanting as the man and woman who wrote them, who now lived in Eleni’s, Adonis’s and Marianna’s imaginations through the stories they had been told. Standing in that room poring over their legacy they could almost believe that Eva and Josef had come to life.

  They read name after name of wildflower that they hoped they might still encounter if walking in the hills and meadows of the island, and which thanks to Eva and Josef Linser had been plucked from obscurity so the world would know of their existence.

  Cyclamen cyprium, Orchis anatolica, Crocus cyprius … a multitude of island species: exotic, exclusive, even mythical; here indeed were the flowers of Aphrodite.

  As she gazed fascinated by their delicate beauty, Eleni’s mind wandered off to the past and to those five women who had shaped her own life. They too, she mused, were Aphrodite’s floral offerings. Her great-grandmother Ernestina, she thought, if she had been a flower, would have been a pious arum lily, whilst her grandmother Olga would have been a majestic rose. Her mother would have been a daisy, cheerful and capricious, and Anita a chrysanthemum, ardent and melancholic. Katerina, she decided, could only have been jasmine, the smallest, most modest of flowers, yet the most fragrant and potent of them all.

  As they stood contemplating the work of their two ancestors they realized that this part of their journey was now complete. A few days ago Eleni, Adonis and Marianna had gathered together with heavy hearts to bury the woman they all considered their surrogate mother. They had travelled to Larnaka for a funeral, not knowing that the journey was to become the most significant they would ever take.

  They had arrived knowing who they were and where they came from, and left with their history rewritten and the perception of who they were transformed. The revelations and uncovered truths they had learned in the course of these few days had redefined their past and changed the course of their future.

  They looked across at each other and as so often when the three of them were together, each knew what the others were thinking. The look carried all the love and tenderness they felt for one another and told them how their journey to the past had helped them understand the present and prepared them for the future. A future full of new possibilities was now waiting for them.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go to my Greek Cypriot friends who first inspired me to embark on this tale. These friends, who were born and have lived in Larnaka all their lives, unveiled a face of this town I did not know existed. In conversation with young and old Larnakides I discovered a town with a past that I never could have imagined.

  My thanks also go, as always, to my agent and good friend Dorie Simmonds for her constant encouragement and belief in me, and of course to my editor Caroline Hogg, who keeps taking a chance on me, and all at Pan Macmillan. I can’t thank Ann Boston enough for her invaluable support and help with editing my first draft.

  Among the Lemon Trees

  By Nadia Marks

  Anna thought her marriage to Max would last forever. They had raised two happy children together, and she looked forward to growing old with the man she loved. But when a revelation from her husband just before their wedding anniversary shakes her entire world, she’s left uncertain of what the future holds.

  Needing time to herself, Anna takes up an offer from her widowed father to spend the summer on the small Aegean island of his birth, unaware that a chance discovery of letters in her aunt�
��s house will unleash a host of family secrets. Kept hidden for sixty years, they reveal a tumultuous family history, beginning in Greece at the start of the twentieth century and ending in Naples at the close of the Second World War.

  Confronted by their family’s long-buried truths, both father and daughter are shaken by the discovery and Anna begins to realize that if she is to ever heal the present, she must first understand the past …

  ‘My book of the year. An utterly gripping story of love and family secrets’ Vanessa Feltz