Many of the lepers had not danced for years, but unless they were so crippled that they could not walk, they were encouraged to get up and join the circle as it slowly rotated. Out of their dust-filled trunks had come pieces of traditional costume, so that among them there were several men in fringed turbans, long boots and knickerbockers, and many of the women had donned their embroidered waistcoats and bright headscarves for the night.
Some of the dances were stately, but when they were not, the fit and active would take their turn, spinning and whirling as though it was the last time they would ever dance. After the dances came the songs, the mantinades. Some were sweet, some melancholy; some were ballads telling long stories that lulled the old folk and children almost to a slumber.
By the time day broke, most people had found their way to bed, but some had passed out across rows of chairs in the taverna, full not just of raki but of the sweetest lamb they had ever feasted on. Not since the Turks had occupied the island had Spinalonga seen such high spirits and hedonism. It was in God’s name that they were celebrating. Christ was risen and in certain ways there had been some kind of rising from the dead for them too, a resurrection of their spirits.
What was left of April became a period of intense activity. Several more lepers had arrived from Athens in March, adding to the half-dozen who had come from various parts of Crete during the winter months. This meant more restoration work was needed, and everyone was aware that once the temperatures had soared there would be many tasks that would be abandoned until the autumn. The Turkish quarter was finally finished and the repairs to the Venetian water tanks were completed. Front doors and shutters had another coat of paint and the tiles on the church roof were all fastened into place.
As Spinalonga rose from its own ashes, Eleni began to decline. She watched the continuing restoration process and could not help comparing it to her own gradual deterioration. For months she had pretended to herself that the disease had met resistance in her body and that there was no development, but then she began to notice changes, almost by the day. The smooth lumps on her feet had multiplied, and for many weeks now she had walked without feeling in them.
‘Isn’t there anything the doctor can do to help?’ Giorgis asked quietly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think we have to face that.’
‘How is Dimitri?’ he asked, trying to change the subject.
‘He’s fine. He’s being very helpful now that I’m finding it harder to walk, and in the last few months he’s grown a lot and can carry all the groceries for me. I can’t help thinking that he is happier here than he was before, though I don’t doubt that he misses his parents.’
‘Does he ever mention them?’
‘He hasn’t said a word about them for weeks and weeks. Do you know something? He hasn’t received one letter from them all the time that he’s been here. Poor child.’
By the end of May, life had settled into its usual summer pattern of long siestas and sultry nights. Flies buzzed around and a haze of heat settled over the island from midday till dusk. Scarcely anything moved during these hours of simmering heat. There was a sense of permanence here now and, though it was unspoken, the majority of people felt that life was worth living. As Eleni hobbled slowly to school on a typical morning, she relished the strong smell of coffee mingling with the sweet scent of mimosa in the street; the sight of a man walking down the hill, his donkey laden with oranges; the sound of ivory backgammon counters click-clacking as they were pushed about the baize and the rattle of the dice punctuating a buzz of conversation in the kafenion . Just as they did in any Cretan village, elderly women sat in doorways facing the street and nodded a greeting as she passed. These women never looked directly at each other when they spoke in case they should miss any comings and goings.
There was plenty happening on Spinalonga. Occasionally there was even a marriage. Such major events, the burgeoning social life on the island and other significant information which the population needed to know soon created the need for a newspaper. Yiannis Solomonidis, formerly a journalist in Athens, took charge and, once he had got hold of a press, printed fifty copies of a weekly newssheet, The Spinalonga Star. These were passed around and devoured with interest by everyone on the island. To start with the newspaper contained the parochial affairs of the island, the title of that week’s film, the opening times of the pharmacy, items lost, found and for sale, and, of course, marriages and deaths. As time went on it began to include a digest of events on the mainland, opinion pieces and even cartoons.
One day in November there was a significant event that went unreported by the newspaper. Not a sentence, not a word recorded the visit of a mysterious dark-haired man whose smart appearance would have made him blend into a crowd in Iraklion. In Plaka however, he was noticed by several people because it was rare for someone to be seen in the village wearing a suit, unless of course there was a wedding or a funeral, and there was neither that day.
Chapter Seven
DR LAPAKIS HAD informed Giorgis that he was expecting a visitor who would need to be brought across to Spinalonga and returned to Plaka a few hours later. His name was Nikolaos Kyritsis. In his early thirties, with thick, black hair, he was slight by comparison with most Cretans and a well-cut suit accentuated his slender build. His skin was taut across his prominent cheek bones. Some considered him distinguished-looking, while others thought he appeared undernourished, and neither view was wrong.
Kyritsis looked incongruous on the Plaka quayside. He had no baggage, no boxes and no tearful family as did most of the people Giorgis took across, just the slimmest of leather portfolios which he held to his chest. The only other people who went to Spinalonga were Lapakis and the very occasional government representative making a quick visit to assess financial requests. This man was the first real visitor Giorgis had ever taken there, and he overcame his usual reticence with strangers and spoke to him.
‘What’s your business on the island?’
‘I’m a doctor,’ the man replied.
‘But there’s already a doctor there,’ said Giorgis. ‘I took him this morning.’
‘Yes, I know. It’s Dr Lapakis I’m going to visit. He is a friend and colleague of mine from many years back.’
‘You aren’t a leper, are you?’ asked Giorgis.
‘No,’ answered the stranger, his face almost creasing into a smile. ‘And one day none of the people on the island will be either.’
This was a bold statement and Giorgis’s heart quickened at the thought. Snippets of news - or was it just rumour? - occasionally filtered through that so-and-so’s uncle or friend had heard something about a development in the cure for leprosy. There had been talk of injections of gold, arsenic and snake venom, for example, but there was a hint of madness about such treatments, and even if they were affordable, would they really work? Only the Athenians, people gossiped, could possibly entertain thoughts of paying for such quack remedies. For a moment, Giorgis day-dreamed as he loosened the boat from its moorings and prepared to take this new doctor across. Eleni’s condition had been getting visibly worse in the past few months and he had begun to lose hope that a cure would ever be found to bring her home, but for the first time since he had taken her to Spinalonga, eighteen months earlier, his heart lifted. Just a little.
Papadimitriou was waiting on the quayside to greet the doctor, and Giorgis watched as they both disappeared out of sight through the tunnel, the dapper figure with his slim leather case and the powerful figure of the island’s leader towering over him.
An icy blast of wind blew across the water, fighting against Giorgis’s boat, but in spite of this, he found himself humming. He would not be perturbed by the elements today.
As the two men walked up the main street together, Papadimitriou grilled Kyritsis. He had enough information at his fingertips to know what questions to ask.
‘Where are they with the latest research? When are they going to start testing it out? How long will it take to reach u
s here? How closely involved are you?’ It was a cross-examination that Kyritsis had not expected, but then he had not anticipated meeting someone like Papadimitriou.
‘It’s early days,’ he said cautiously. ‘I’m part of a widespread research programme being funded by the Pasteur Foundation, but it’s not just the cure we’re hunting for. There are new guidelines on treatment and prevention that were set down at the Cairo Conference a couple of years ago, and that’s my main interest in coming here. I want to make sure that we are doing all we can - I don’t want the cure, if and when it’s found, to be too late for everyone here.’
Papadimitriou, a consummate actor, concealed his mild disappointment that the longed-for cure was still out of reach by laughing it off: ‘That’s too bad. I’d promised my family I’d be back in Athens by Christmas, so I was relying on you for a magic potion.’
Kyritsis was a realist. He knew it could be some years until these people received successful treatment and he would not raise their hopes. Leprosy was a disease almost as old as the hills themselves and was not going to vanish overnight.
As the men walked together to the hospital, Kyritsis took in the sights and sounds around him with some incredulity. It looked like any normal village, albeit less run-down than many in that part of Crete. Except for the occasional inhabitant he spotted with an enlarged earlobe or perhaps a crippled foot - signs which might not have been noticed by most - the people living there could have been ordinary folk going about their business. At this time of year there were few faces in full view. Men wore their caps pulled down and their collars turned up and women had their woollen shawls furled tightly around their heads and shoulders, protecting themselves from the elements, the wind which grew wilder by the day and the rain which fell in torrents and turned streets into streams.
The two men passed the glass-fronted shops with their brightly painted shutters, and the baker, removing a batch of sandy-coloured loaves from his oven, caught Kyritsis’s eye and nodded. Kyritsis touched the brim of his hat in reply. Just before the church, they turned off the central street. High above them was the hospital. Particularly from below, it was an imposing sight, a building far grander than any other on the island.
Lapakis was at the front entrance to greet Kyritsis, and the two men embraced in a spontaneous display of genuine affection. For a few moments greetings and questions overlapped each other in a helter-skelter of enthusiasm. ‘How are you? How long have you been here? What’s happening in Athens? Tell me your news!’ Eventually, their mutual delight at seeing each other gave way to practicalities. Time was running away. Lapakis took Kyritsis on a swift guided tour of the hospital, showing him the outpatients’ clinic and treatment rooms and finally the ward.
‘We have so few resources at present. More people should be coming in for a few days, but we simply have to treat the majority and send them back home,’ said Lapakis wearily.
In the ward, ten beds were packed in with no more than half a metre between each. All of them were occupied, some by men and some by women, though it was hard to tell which was which, since the shutters were closed and only a few faint streaks of light filtered through. Most of these patients were at the end of the line. Kyritsis, who had spent some time in the leprosy hospital in Athens, was unshocked. The conditions, the overcrowding and the smell there had been a hundred times worse. Here, at least, there was some attention to hygiene, which could mean the difference between life and death for someone with infected ulcers.
‘All of these patients are in a reactive state,’ said Lapakis quietly, leaning against the doorframe. This was the phase of leprosy where the symptoms of the disease intensified, sometimes for days or even weeks. During their time in this state patients were in terrible pain, with a raging fever and sores that were more agonising than ever. Lepra reaction could leave them sicker than before, but sometimes it indicated that the body was struggling to eliminate the disease and when their suffering subsided they might find themselves healed.
As the two men stood looking into the room, most of the patients were quiet. One moaned intermittently and another, whom Kyritsis thought was a woman but could not be sure, groaned. Lapakis and Kyritsis withdrew from the doorway. It seemed intrusive to stand there.
‘Come to my office,’ said Lapakis. ‘We’ll talk there.’
He led Kyritsis down a dark corridor to the very last door on the left. Unlike the ward, this was a room with a view. Huge windows which reached from waist height almost to the lofty ceiling looked out towards Plaka and the mountains that rose up behind it. Pinned up on the wall was a large architectural drawing of the hospital as it was now and, in red, the outline of an additional building.
Lapakis saw that the drawing had caught Kyritsis’s eye.
‘These are my plans,’ he said. ‘We need another ward and several more treatment rooms. The men and women ought to be separated - if they can’t have their lives, the very least we can give them is their dignity.’
Kyritsis strolled over to look at the scheme. He knew how low a priority the government gave to health, particularly of those they regarded as terminally ill, and he could not help but let his cynicism show.
‘That’s going to cost some money,’ he said.
‘I know, I know,’ replied Lapakis wearily, ‘but now that our patients are coming from mainland Greece as well as Crete, the government is obliged to come up with some funding. And when you meet a few more of the lepers we have here, you’ll see they’re not the sort to take no for an answer. But what brought you back to Crete? I was so glad to get your letter, but you didn’t really say why you were coming here.’
The two men began to speak with the easy intimacy of those who had spent their student years together. They had both been at medical school in Athens, and although six years had passed since they had last met, they were able to pick up their friendship as if they had never been apart.
‘It’s quite simple, really,’ said Kyritsis. ‘I’d grown tired of Athens, and when I saw a post advertised at the hospital in Iraklion in the Department of Dermatovenereology I applied. I knew I’d be able to continue my research, especially with the large number of lepers you now have here. Spinalonga is altogether a perfect place for a case study. Would you be happy for me to make occasional visits - and, more importantly, do you think the patients would tolerate it?’
‘I certainly have no objection, and I am sure they wouldn’t either.’
‘At some point, there might even be some new treatments to try out - though I’m not promising anything dramatic. To be honest, the results of the latest remedies have been singularly unimpressive. But we can’t stand still, can we?’
Lapakis sat at his desk. He had listened intently and his heart had lifted with every word that Kyritsis had spoken. For five long years he had been the only doctor prepared to visit Spinalonga, and during that time he had treated a relentless stream of the sick and the dying. Every night when he undressed for bed he checked his ample body for signs of the disease. He knew this was ridiculous and that the bacteria could be living in his system for months or even years before he was aware of their presence, but his deep anxieties were one of the reasons he only came across to Spinalonga on three days a week. He had to give himself a fighting chance. His role here was a calling that he had felt obliged to follow, but he feared the possibility of his remaining free of leprosy was no greater than the prospect of a long life for a man who regularly played Russian roulette.
Lapakis did have some help now. It was at precisely the moment when he could no longer cope with the slow wave of the sick who hobbled up the hill each day, some to stay for weeks and others just to have their bandages and dressings replaced, that Athina Manakis arrived. She had been a doctor in Athens before discovering that she had leprosy and admitting herself to the leprosarium there before being sent to Spinalonga with the rest of the Athenian rebels. Here she had a new role. Lapakis could not believe his luck: here was someone not only willing to live in at the hospital but
who also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of general practice; just because they were leprous it did not stop the inhabitants of Spinalonga from suffering from a whole gamut of other complaints, such as mumps, measles and simple earache, and these ailments were often left unattended. Athina Manakis’s twenty-five years’ experience and her willingness to work every hour except those when she slept made her invaluable, and Lapakis did not at all mind the fact that she treated him as though he was a younger brother who needed knocking into shape. If he had believed in God, he would have thanked Him heartily.
Now, out of the blue - or, more accurately, out of the grey of this November day when sea and sky competed with each other for drabness - Nikolaos Kyritsis had arrived, asking if he could make regular visits. Lapakis could have wept with relief. His had been a lonely and thankless job and now his isolation had come to an end. When he left the hospital at the end of each day, washing himself down with a sulphurous solution in the great Venetian arsenal that now served as the disinfection room, there would no longer be a nagging sense of inadequacy. There was Athina, and now there would sometimes be Kyritsis.
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