The Island

by Victoria Hislop

  It was when Lapakis found his patient gasping for breath the next morning and incapable of replying to any of his usual questions that he realised Eleni had entered a new and perhaps final stage.

  ‘Kyria Petrakis, I need to look at your throat,’ he said gently. With the new sores around her lips, he knew that even getting her to open her mouth wide enough to look inside would be uncomfortable. The examination only confirmed his fears. He glanced up at Dr Manakis, who was standing on the other side of the bed.

  ‘We’ll be back in one moment,’ he said, taking Eleni’s hand as he spoke.

  The two doctors left the room, closing the door quietly behind them. Dr Lapakis spoke quietly and hurriedly.

  ‘There are at least half a dozen lesions in her throat and the epiglottis is inflamed. I can’t even see the back of the pharynx for swelling. We need to keep her comfortable - I don’t think she has long.’

  He returned to the room, sat down beside Eleni and took her hand. Her breathlessness seemed to have worsened in the moments they had been away. It was the point he had reached before with so many patients, when he knew that there was nothing more he could do for them, except keep them company for the last hours. The hospital’s elevated position gave it the best views of anywhere in Spinalonga, and as he sat by Eleni’s bedside, listening to her increasingly laboured breathing, he gazed through the huge window which looked out across the water to Plaka. He thought of Giorgis, who would be setting off towards Spinalonga later that day to race with the white horses across the sea.

  Eleni’s breathing now came in short gasps, and her eyes were wide open, brimming with tears and full of fear. He could see there would be no peace at the end of this life and gripped her hands in both of his as if to try and reassure her. It may have been for two, maybe even three hours that he sat like this before the end finally came. Eleni’s last breath was a futile struggle for another which failed to arrive.

  The best any doctor could tell a bereaved family was that their loved one had died peacefully. It was an untruth Lapakis had told before and would willingly tell again. He hurried out of the hospital. He wanted to be waiting at the quayside when Giorgis arrived.

  Some way off shore, the boat lurched up and down in the high, early spring waves. Giorgis was puzzled that Dr Lapakis was already waiting. It was unusual for his passenger to be there first, but there was also something in his manner that made Giorgis nervous.

  ‘Can we stay here a moment?’ Lapakis asked him, conscious that he must break the news here and now and give Giorgis time to compose himself before they were back in Plaka and he had to confront his daughters. He held out his hand to Giorgis to help him off the boat, then folded his arms and stared at the ground, nervously moving a stone about with the tip of his right shoe.

  Giorgis knew even before the doctor spoke that his hopes were about to be destroyed.

  They sat down on the low stone wall that had been built around the pine trees and both men looked out across the sea.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Giorgis said quietly. It was not just the lines of distress left on Lapakis’s face by a gruelling day that had given the news away. A man can simply feel it in the air when his wife is no longer there.

  ‘I am so, so sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘There was nothing we could do in the end. She died peacefully.’

  He had his arm around Giorgis’s shoulder, and the older man, head in hands, now shed such heavy and copious tears that they splashed his dirty shoes and darkened the dust around his feet. They sat like this for more than an hour, and it was nearly seven o’clock, the sky almost dark and the air now crisp and cold, when the tears no longer coursed down his face. He was as dry as a wrung cloth and had reached the moment of grieving when exhaustion and a strange sense of relief descend as those first intense tidal waves of grief pass.

  ‘The girls will be wondering where I am,’ he said. ‘We must get back.’

  As they bumped up and down across the water in near darkness towards the lights of Plaka, Giorgis confessed to Lapakis that he had kept the seriousness of Eleni’s condition from his daughters.

  ‘You were right to do that,’ Lapakis said comfortingly. ‘Only a month ago I still believed she could win the fight. It’s never wrong to have hope.’

  It was much later than usual when Giorgis arrived home, and the girls had been growing anxious about him. The moment he walked in the door they knew something was terribly wrong.

  ‘It’s our mother, isn’t it?’ demanded Anna. ‘Something has happened to her!’

  Giorgis’s face crumpled. He gripped the back of a chair, his features contorted. Maria stepped forward and put her arms round him.

  ‘Sit down, Father,’ she said. ‘Tell us what’s happened . . . please.’

  Giorgis sat at the table trying to compose himself. A few minutes elapsed before he could speak.

  ‘Your mother . . . is dead.’ He almost choked on the words.

  ‘Dead!’ shrieked Anna. ‘But we didn’t know she was going to die!’

  Anna had never accepted that her mother’s illness could have only one real, inevitable conclusion. Giorgis’s decision to keep the news of her deterioration from them meant that this came as a huge shock to them both. It was as though their mother had died twice and the distress they had felt nearly five years before had to be experienced all over again. Older, but little wiser than she had been as a twelve-year-old, Anna’s first reaction was one of anger that their father had not given them any warning and that this cataclysmic event had come out of the blue.

  For half a decade, the photograph of Giorgis and Eleni which hung on the wall by the fireplace had provided the image of their mother which Anna and Maria carried around in their heads. Their only memories of her were general ones, of maternal kindness and the aura of happy routine. They had long since forgotten the reality of Eleni and had only this idealised picture of her in traditional dress, a long, richly draped skirt, a narrow apron and a splendid saltamarka, an embroidered blouse with sleeves slit to the elbows. With her smiling face and long dark hair, braided and wound round her head, she was the archetype of Cretan beauty, captured for ever in the moment when the camera’s shutters had snapped. The finality of their mother’s death was hard to grasp. They had always cherished the hope that she would return, and as talk of a cure had increased, their hopes had risen. And now this.

  Anna’s sobs from the upstairs room were audible down the street and as far as the village square. Maria’s tears did not come so easily. She looked at her father and saw a man physically diminished by grief. Eleni’s death not only represented an end to his hopes and expectations, but the end of a friendship. His life had been turned upside down when she was exiled, but now it was changed beyond repair.

  ‘She died peacefully,’ he told Maria that night, as the two of them ate supper. A place had been laid for Anna but she could not be coaxed down the stairs, let alone to eat.

  Nothing had prepared any of them for the impact of Eleni’s death. Their three-cornered family unit was only meant to be temporary, wasn’t it? For forty days an oil lamp burned in the front room as a mark of respect and the doors and windows of their home remained closed. Eleni had been buried on Spinalonga under one of the concrete slabs that formed the communal graveyard, but she was remembered in Plaka by the lighting of a single candle in the church of Agia Marina on the edge of the village, where the sea was so close it lapped against the church steps.

  After a few months, Maria, and even Anna, moved beyond the stages of mourning. For a time, their own personal tragedy had eclipsed wider world events, but when they emerged from their cocoon of grief, all continued to go on around them just as it had before.

  In April, the daring kidnap of General Kreipe, commander of the Sebastopol Division in Crete, added to the state of tension across the island. With the help of members of the resistance, Kreipe had been ambushed by Allied troops disguised as Germans and, in spite of a massive manhunt, was smuggled from his headquarters outside Ira
klion over the mountains to the south coast of Crete. From here he was shipped off to Egypt, the Allies’ most valuable prisoner of war. There were fears that the reprisals for this audacious abduction might be more barbaric than ever. The Germans made it clear, however, that the terror they were still perpetrating would have happened in any case. One of the worst waves of all took place in May. Vangelis Lidaki had been returning from Neapoli when he saw the awful burnt-out villages.

  ‘They’ve destroyed them,’ he ranted. ‘They’ve burned them to the ground.’

  The men in the bar listened in disbelief to his descriptions of the smoke still rising from the ashes of the flame-engulfed villages south of the Lasithi mountains, and their hearts went cold.

  A few days after this event, a copy of a newssheet published by the Germans found its way to Plaka via Antonis, who had visited briefly to reassure his parents that he was still alive. The tone of it was as threatening as ever:

  The villages of Margarikari, Lokhria, Kamares and Saktouria and the nearby parts of the Nome of Iraklion have been razed to the ground and their inhabitants have been dealt with.

  These villages had offered protection to Communist bands and we find the entire population guilty of failing to report these treasonable practices.

  Bandits have roamed freely in the Saktouria region with the full support of the local populace and have been given shelter by them. At Margarikari, the traitor Petrakgeorgis openly celebrated Easter with the inhabitants.

  Listen carefully to us, Cretans. Recognise who your real enemies are and protect yourselves from those who cause retribution to be brought down on you. We have always warned you of the dangers of collaboration with the British. We are losing patience now. The German sword will destroy everyone who associates with the bandits and the British.

  The sheet was passed around, read and reread until the paper was worn thin with handling. It did not dampen the villagers’ resolve.

  ‘It just shows they’re getting desperate,’ said Lidaki.

  ‘Yes, but we’re getting desperate too,’ answered his wife. ‘How much longer can we stand it? If we stopped helping the andarte, we could sleep easy in our beds.’

  Conversation continued long into the night. To surrender and co-operate went against everything that was instinctive to most Cretans. They should resist, they should fight. Besides, they liked fighting. From a minor argument to a decade-old blood feud between families, the men thrived on conflict. Many of the women, by contrast, prayed hard for peace and thought their prayers had been answered as they read between the lines and detected sinking morale among their occupiers.

  The printing and distribution of such threats might well be an act of desperation, but, whatever the motivation behind them, it was a fact that villages had been razed to the ground. Every home in them had been reduced to a smoking ruin and the landscape around was now scarred with the eerie silhouettes of blackened, twisted trees. Anna insisted to her father that they should tell the Germans everything they knew.

  ‘Why should we risk Plaka being destroyed?’ she demanded.

  ‘Some of it’s just propaganda,’ interjected Maria.

  ‘But not all of it!’ retorted Anna.

  The propaganda war was not only being waged by the Germans, however. The British were orchestrating their own campaign and finding it an effective weapon. They produced newssheets that gave the impression that the enemy’s position was weakening, spread rumours of a British landing and exaggerated the success of resistance activities. ‘Kapitulation’ was the theme, and the Germans would wake to the sight of huge letter Ks daubed liberally on their sentry boxes, barrack walls and vehicles. Even in villages such as Plaka, mothers waited nervously for their sons to return after trips to perpetrate acts of graffiti vandalism; the boys, of course, were thrilled to be contributing something to the effort, never imagining for a minute that they were putting themselves in any danger.

  Such attempts to undermine the Germans may have been small in themselves but they helped to change the bigger picture. The tide was turning throughout Europe, and cracks had appeared in the Nazis’ firm hold on the continent. In Crete, morale was now so low that German troops were starting to withdraw; some, even, to desert.

  It was Maria who noticed that the small garrison in Plaka had cleared out. At six o’clock sharp there was always a show of force, a supposedly intimidating march through the main street and back again with the occasional interrogation of someone en route.

  ‘Something’s strange,’ she said to Fotini. ‘Something’s different.’

  It did not take long to work it out. It was now ten past six and the familiar sound of steel-capped boots had not been heard.

  ‘You’re right,’ replied Fotini. ‘It’s quiet.’

  The tension that hung in the air seemed to have lifted.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ suggested Maria.

  The two girls, rather than ambling on to the beach as they usually did, kept to the main street until it ran out. Right at this point was the house where the German garrison had their headquarters. The front door and the shutters were wide open.

  ‘Come on,’ said Fotini. ‘I’m going to look inside.’

  She stood on tiptoes and peered through the front window. She could see a table, bare but for an ashtray piled high with cigarette butts, and four chairs, two of them tipped carelessly on to the floor.

  ‘It looks like they’ve gone,’ she said excitedly. ‘I’m going inside.’

  ‘Are you sure there’s no one in there?’ asked Maria.

  ‘Pretty positive,’ whispered Fotini as she stepped across the threshold.

  Except for a few stray bits of rubbish and a yellowing German newspaper discarded on the floor, the house was empty. The two girls ran home and reported the news to Pavlos, who went immediately to the bar. Within an hour word had swept round the village, and that evening the square was filled with people celebrating the release of their own small corner of the island.

  Only days later, on 11 October 1944, Iraklion was liberated. Remarkably, given all the bloodshed of the previous few years, the German troops were calmly escorted out of the city gate without any loss of life; the violence was saved for anyone who was perceived to have collaborated. German troops did, however, continue to occupy parts of western Crete, and it was some months before that situation changed.

  One morning in early summer the following year, Lidaki had the radio blaring in the bar. He was washing glasses from the night before in his customary slapdash manner, sluicing them in a bowl of grey water before wiping them with a cloth that had already been used to mop a few puddles on the floor. He was mildly irritated when the music was suddenly interrupted for a news announcement, but his ears pricked up when he caught the solemnity of the tone.

  ‘Today, the eighth of May 1945, the Germans have officially surrendered. Within a few days all enemy troops will have withdrawn from the Hania area and Crete will once again be free.’

  The music resumed and Lidaki wondered if the announcement had just been a trick of his own mind. He stuck his head out of the door of the bar and saw Giorgis hastening towards him.

  ‘Have you heard?’ he asked.

  ‘I have!’ replied Lidaki.

  It was true then. The tyranny was over. Though the people of Crete had always believed that they would drive the enemy from their island, when the moment came their joy was unrestrained. A celebration to end all celebrations would have to be held.

  Part 3

  Chapter Ten

  1945

  IT WAS AS though they had been breathing in a poisonous gas and now once again there was oxygen in the atmosphere. Members of the resistance were arriving back in their villages, often after travelling hundreds of miles to reach them, and fresh bottles of raki were uncorked to toast every return. Within a fortnight of the end of occupation it was the feast of Agios Konstandinos, and the celebration of this saint’s day was the excuse everyone needed to throw all caution to the wind. A cloud ha
d lifted and madness descended in its place. Fatted goats and well-fed sheep rotated on spits the length and breadth of Crete, and fireworks crackled in the sky across the island, reminding some people of the explosions which had ripped through their cities and illuminated the skies in the early days of the war. No one dwelt on this comparison, however; they wanted to look forward now, not back.

  For the feast of Agios Konstandinos, the girls of Plaka donned their finery. They had been to church, but their minds were on things other than the sacred nature of the event. These adolescent girls had few restrictions placed on them because they were still perceived as children and innocence was presumed in all they said and did. It was only later, when their womanliness was already developed, that their parents woke up to their sexuality and began to keep a close eye on them, sometimes rather too late. By then, of course, many of these girls had stolen kisses from village boys and engaged in secret trysts in the olive groves or fields on the way home from school.