The Island

by Victoria Hislop

  Levels of starvation in Crete were, by now, reaching such high levels that it was not unheard of for local people to accept what was known as the ‘Deutsche drachma’ for a tip-off about the whereabouts of resistance fighters. Famine and hunger could corrupt even honest people, and such betrayals led to some of the worst atrocities of the war, with mass executions and the destruction of whole villages. The old and sick were incinerated in their beds and men forced to hand over their weapons before being shot in cold blood. The dangers of betrayal were real and meant that Antonis and all like him made only rare and brief visits to their families, knowing that their presence might endanger those they loved the most.

  Throughout the war, the only place that really remained immune from the Germans was Spinalonga, where the lepers were protected from the worst disease of all: the occupation. Leprosy might have disrupted families and friends but the Germans made an even more effective job of destroying everything they touched.

  As a result of the occupation, Nikolaos Kyritsis’s visits to Plaka immediately ceased, since unnecessary travel to and from Iraklion was regarded with suspicion by the occupying troops. Loath as he was to do it, Kyritsis abandoned his research for the time being; the needs of the wounded and dying all around him in Iraklion could not be ignored. The repercussions of this insane invasion meant that anyone with any medical expertise found himself working round the clock to help the ill and the mutilated, applying dressings, fixing splints and treating the symptoms of dysentery, tuberculosis and malaria, which were rife in the field hospitals. When he returned from the hospital at night, Kyritsis was so exhausted he rarely thought of the lepers who, for such a tantalisingly brief time, had been the focus of his efforts.

  The absence of Dr Kyritsis was perhaps the worst side-effect of the war on the inhabitants of Spinalonga. In the months during which he had been making his weekly visits they had nurtured hopes for the future. Now, once again, the present was their only certainty.

  Giorgis’s routine of coming and going from the island was more fixed than ever. He was soon aware that the Athenians had no difficulty in affording the same luxuries as they had done before the war, in spite of the soaring prices they had to pay.

  ‘Look,’ he said to his friends on the quayside one evening as they sat repairing their nets, ‘I’d be a fool to ask too many questions. They have the money to pay me, so what right do I have to question their being able to afford to buy on the black market?’

  ‘But there are people round here who are down to their last handful of flour,’ protested one of the other fishermen.

  Jealousy of the Athenians’ wealth dominated conversation in the bar.

  ‘Why should they eat better than we do?’ demanded Pavlos. ‘And how come they can afford chocolate and good tobacco?’

  ‘They have money, that’s why,’ said Giorgis. ‘Even if they don’t have their freedom.’

  ‘Freedom!’ scoffed Lidaki. ‘You call this freedom? Our country taken over by the bloody Germans, our young men brutalised and the old people burnt to death in their beds? They’re the ones who are free!’ he said, stabbing his finger in the direction of Spinalonga.

  Giorgis knew it was pointless arguing with them and said nothing more. Even the friends who had known her well now occasionally forgot that Eleni was on the island. Sometimes he would get a muttered apology for their lack of tact. Only he and Dr Lapakis knew the reality, and even then Giorgis was conscious that he only knew the half of it. He saw little more than the gateway and the lofty walls but he heard plenty of stories from Eleni.

  On his last visit, there had been a further change in her condition. First it had been the unsightly lumps that had spread to her chest and back and, most horrifyingly, to her face. Now her voice was becoming less and less audible, and though Giorgis thought this could sometimes be attributed to emotion, he knew it was not the entire cause. She said her throat felt constricted and promised she would go and see Dr Lapakis to get something for it. Meanwhile she tried to remain cheerful with Giorgis so that he did not take his downcast face back home to the girls.

  He knew the disease was taking her over and that she, like the majority of the lepers on the island, whether they were impoverished or sitting on a fortune, was losing hope.

  These men with whom Giorgis mended nets and sat in the bar whiling away the time playing backgammon and cards were the same people he had grown up with. Their bigoted, narrow views would have been his too if he had not been set apart by his connection with Spinalonga. This one element in his life had given him an understanding they would never have. He would keep his temper and excuse their ignorance, for that was all it was.

  Giorgis continued to take his packages and parcels to the island. What did he care if the contents were procured under the counter? Would everyone not have bought the best if only they had the resources of the Athenians? He himself yearned to be able to buy the luxuries for his daughters that only some of the inhabitants of Spinalonga could now afford. For his own part, he very consciously took the best of his catch - once Anna and Maria had eaten their fill - to the leper colony. Why should they not have his biggest bream or bass? These people were sick and cast out of society, but they were not criminals. That was something the people of Plaka conveniently forgot.

  The Germans feared Spinalonga with its hundreds of lepers living just across the water and allowed deliveries to continue, since the last thing they wanted was for any of them to leave the island to search out their own supplies on the mainland. One of them did, however, take his chance to escape. It was in the late summer of 1943, and the Italian armistice had led to a heavier German presence in the province of Lasithi.

  Late one afternoon, Fotini, Anna, Maria and a group of five or six others were playing as usual on the beach. They were accustomed now to the presence of German soldiers among them, and the fact that there was one patrolling close by on the beach did not attract their interest.

  ‘Let’s skim stones,’ shouted one of the boys.

  ‘Yes, first to twenty!’ replied another.

  There was no shortage of smooth, flat pebbles on the beach, and soon their stones were flying across the water, bouncing lightly across the still surface, as they all tried to reach the ambitious target.

  Suddenly one of the boys was shouting at them all: ‘Stop! Stop! There’s someone out there!’

  He was right. There was a figure swimming out from the island. The German soldier could see it too and was watching, his arms folded in contempt. The children jumped up and down, screaming at the swimmer to turn back, anticipating the awful outcome.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ cried Maria. ‘Doesn’t he know he’s going to get killed?’

  The leper’s progress was slow but relentless. He was either unaware of the soldier’s presence or just prepared to take the risk - however suicidal it was - because he could no longer bear life on the colony. The children continued to shout at the tops of their voices, but at the moment when the German raised his gun to fire they were all silenced by fear. He waited until the man had swum to within fifty metres of the beach and then shot him. It was a cold-blooded execution. Simply target practice. At that stage of the war the air was thick with stories of bloodshed and execution but the children had witnessed none of it themselves. In that moment they saw the difference between stories and reality. A single shot ricocheted across the water, the noise amplified by the echo from the mountains behind, and a crimson blanket spread itself slowly across the still sea.

  Anna, the oldest among them, screamed abuse at the soldier. ‘You bastard! You German bastard!’

  A few of the younger children wept with fear and shock. These were the tears of lost innocence. By now dozens of people had rushed from their homes and saw them huddled together, sobbing and crying. Rumours had reached Plaka only that week that the enemy had adopted a new tactic: whenever they suspected the possibility of a guerrilla attack, the Germans would take all the young girls from a village and use them as hostages. Knowing t
hat the safety of their children was far from guaranteed, the villagers’ first thought was that some atrocity had been committed against one of them by the lone soldier who stood facing them a few metres down the beach. They were ready, although unarmed, to tear him to shreds. But with the utmost sang-froid he turned to face the sea and gestured defiantly towards the island. The body had long since disappeared but the patch of crimson still floated, clinging to the surface like an oil slick.

  Anna, always the ringleader, broke from the wailing group and shouted to the group of anxious adults: ‘A leper!’

  They understood immediately and turned away from the German soldier. Their attitude had changed now. Some of them were less than bothered by the death of a leper. There were still plenty left. In the short time it took for the parents to reassure themselves that their children were unharmed, the soldier had vanished. So too had the victim and all traces of him. Everyone could forget all about him.

  Giorgis, however, would not find it so easy. His feelings about the inhabitants of Spinalonga were anything but neutral. That night, when he took his battered old caique across the water, Eleni told him that the leper whose cold-blooded execution they had all witnessed was a young man called Nikos. It transpired that he had been making regular forays from the island when it was pitch dark to visit his wife and child. Rumour had it that it had been his son’s third birthday on the day he died and he wished for once to see him before nightfall.

  The children on the shore at Plaka had not been Nikos’s only audience. A crowd had also gathered to watch him on Spinalonga. There were no rules or regulations to protect people from such folly and few felt the restraining hand of husband, wife or lover when they were spurred to some spontaneous act of insanity as this. Nikos had been like a starving man and his hunger dominated his every thought and waking moment. He craved the company of his wife, but even more the sight of his son, his own flesh and blood, the image of his unscarred, unblemished boyhood, a mirror of himself as a child. He had paid for his desire with his life.

  Nikos was mourned on the little island that night. Prayers were said in the church and a wake was held for him even though there was no body to bury. Death was never ignored on Spinalonga. It was handled with as much dignity there as it would be anywhere else on Crete.

  After this incident, Fotini, Anna and Maria and all the other children playing with them that day lived under a cloud of anxiety. In a single moment on this stretch of warm pebbles where they had enjoyed so much carefree childhood happiness, everything had changed.

  Chapter Nine

  ALTHOUGH THE LEPER executed just metres off their shore had meant little to most of them personally, the hatred the people of Plaka felt for the Germans intensified after this incident. It had brought the reality of war to the very threshold of their homes and made them realise that their village was now as vulnerable as anywhere in this worldwide conflict. Reactions varied. For many people, God was the only source of true peace, and the churches were sometimes full to overflowing with people bent in prayer. A few of the old people, Fotini’s grandmother, for instance, spent so much time in the company of the priest that they permanently carried the sweet perfume of incense with them. ‘Grandma smells like candle wax!’ Fotini would cry, dancing around the old lady, who smiled indulgently at her only granddaughter. Even if He did not appear to be doing much to help them win it, her faith told her that God was on their side in this war, and when stories of the destruction and desecration of churches reached her, it only intensified her belief.

  The panegyria, saints’ days, were still celebrated. Icons would be taken from their safe places and carried in procession by the priests, the town band following them with an almost unholy cacophony of brass and drums. Lavish feasting and the sound of fireworks may have been missing, but when the relics had been safely returned to the church, people still danced wildly and sang their haunting songs with even more passion than in times of peace. Fury and frustration at the continuing occupation would be washed away with the best wines, but as dawn broke and sobriety returned, everything was as it had been before. It was then that those whose faith was less than rock solid began to question why God had not answered their prayers.

  The Germans were no doubt bemused by these displays of the sacred and the curiously profane but knew better than to ban them. They did, however, do what they could to interfere, demanding to question the priest just as he was about to begin a service or to search houses as the dancing got into full swing.

  On Spinalonga, candles were lit daily for those suffering on the mainland. The islanders were well aware that the Cretans were living in fear of German cruelty, and prayed for a swift end to the occupation.

  Dr Lapakis, who believed in the power of medicine rather than divine intervention, began to grow disillusioned. He knew that research and testing had been more or less abandoned. He had sent letters to Kyritsis in Iraklion, but since they had gone unanswered for many months, he came to the conclusion that his colleague must be dealing with more pressing issues and resigned himself to a long wait before he saw him again. Lapakis increased the number of visits he made to Spinalonga from three to six days a week. Some of the lepers needed constant attention, and Athina Manakis could not cope alone. One such patient was Eleni.

  Giorgis would never forget the day he came to the island and saw, instead of the slender silhouette of his wife, the squatter figure of Elpida, her friend. His heartbeat had quickened. What had happened to Eleni? It was the first time she had not been there to greet him. Elpida spoke first.

  ‘Don’t worry, Giorgis,’ she said, trying to inject reassurance into her voice. ‘Eleni is fine.’

  ‘Where is she then?’ There was an unmistakable note of panic in his tone.

  ‘She has to spend a few days in the hospital. Dr Lapakis is keeping her under observation for a while until her throat improves.’

  ‘And will it improve?’ he asked.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Elpida. ‘I’m sure the doctors are doing everything they can.’

  Her statement was noncommittal. Elpida knew no more about the chances of Eleni’s survival than Giorgis himself.

  Giorgis left the packages he was delivering and quickly returned to Plaka. It was a Saturday, and Maria noticed that her father was back much earlier than usual.

  ‘That was a short visit,’ she said. ‘How is Mother? Did you bring a letter?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no letter,’ he replied. ‘She hasn’t had time to write this week.’

  This much was entirely true, but he left the house quickly before Maria could ask any more questions.

  ‘I’ll be back by four,’ he said. ‘I need to go and mend my nets.’

  Maria could tell something was wrong, and the feeling lingered with her all day.

  For the next four months Eleni lay in the hospital, too ill to struggle through the tunnel to meet Giorgis. Each day when he brought Lapakis to Spinalonga he looked in vain, expecting her to be waiting under the pine trees for him. Every evening Lapakis would report to him, at first with a diluted version of the truth.

  ‘Her body is still fighting the disease,’ he would say, or ‘I think her temperature has gone down slightly today.’

  But the doctor soon realised that he was building false hopes, and that the more these were reinforced the harder it would be when the final days came, as he knew, in the pit of his stomach, they would. It was not as though he was lying when he said that Eleni’s body was fighting. It was engaged in a raging battle, with every tissue fighting the bacteria that struggled to dominate. Lepra fever had two possible outcomes: deterioration or improvement. The lesions on Eleni’s legs, back, neck and face had now multiplied, and she lay racked with pain, finding no comfort whichever way she turned. Her body was a mass of ulcers which Lapakis did everything he could to treat, holding on to the basic principle that if they were kept clean and disinfected he might be able to minimise the virulently multiplying bacteria.

  It was during this p
hase that Elpida took Dimitri to see Eleni. He was now living at the Kontomaris house, an arrangement they had all hoped would be temporary but that was now looking as though it might be permanent.

  ‘Hello, Dimitri,’ Eleni said weakly. Then, turning her head towards Elpida, she managed just two more words: ‘Thank you.’

  Her voice was very quiet but Elpida knew what her words had acknowledged: that the thirteen-year-old boy was now in her capable hands. This at least might give her some peace of mind.

  Eleni had been moved into a small room where she could be alone, away from the stares of the other patients and neither disturbed by them nor a disturbance to them in the dead of night, when the agony worsened and her sheets became saturated with fever and her groans continuous. Athina Manakis tended to her in those dark hours, spooning watery soup between her lips and sponging down her fiery brow. The quantities of soup were ever-diminishing, however, and one night she ceased to be able to swallow at all. Not even water could slip down her throat.