‘What about starting the treatment with the next group?’
Lapakis was both excited and impatient. No one would be bold enough to claim that these lepers had been cured, and it would be a few months until they actually ran tests to see whether the leprosy bacillus had been eliminated from their systems. He had a gut feeling that after all these years of talk, false starts and no real faith in a cure, a turning point had been reached. Resignation, even despair, could now be replaced with hope.
‘Yes, there’s no point in waiting. I think we should select the next fifteen as soon as possible. As before, they should be in good general health,’ said Kyritsis.
With every bone in his body, he wanted to make sure that Maria was among the list of names, but he knew it would be unprofessional to exert his influence. His mind had drifted from discussion of the new treatment to thoughts of when he would see Maria again. Each day would seem an age.
The following Monday, Fotini arrived on the island as usual. Maria wanted to tell her about the hero’s welcome Dr Kyritsis had received the previous week, but she could see that Fotini was bursting with news. She had hardly got inside Maria’s door before she came out with it.
‘Anna’s pregnant!’
‘At last,’ Maria said, unsure whether this news was good or bad. ‘Does my father know?’
‘He can’t do, otherwise he would have said something to you, surely?’
‘I suppose he would,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘How did you find out?’
‘Through Antonis, of course. By all accounts the estate has been buzzing with speculation for weeks!’
‘Tell me then. Tell me what they’ve been saying,’ said Maria, impatient for detail.
‘Well, for weeks and weeks Anna wasn’t seen outside the house and there were rumours of ill-health, and then one day last week she finally reappeared in public - having put on a very noticeable amount of weight!’
‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s pregnant,’ exclaimed Maria.
‘Oh yes it does, because they’ve announced it. She’s three and a half months gone.’
In her first few months of pregnancy, Anna had been racked by sickness. Every morning and throughout the day she heaved and retched. Nothing she ate stayed inside her, and for several weeks her doctor was doubtful that the baby would survive at all. He had never seen a woman so ill, so reduced by pregnancy, and once the vomiting subsided there was a new problem. She began to bleed. The only way she might save this baby now was to have complete bed-rest. It seemed, however, that the child was determined to cling on, and in her fourteenth week of pregnancy everything stabilised. To Andreas’s great relief Anna then rose from her bed.
The gaunt face that had stared back at Anna from the mirror only a month before was now rounded once more, and as she turned sideways she could clearly see a bump. Her trademark slim-fitting coats and dresses had been put in the back of the wardrobe and she now wore more voluminous clothes, under which her belly slowly swelled.
It was an excuse for celebration on the estate. Andreas threw open his cellar, and early one evening under the trees outside the house all his workers came to drink the best of the previous year’s wine. Manoli was there too, and his was the loudest voice among them as they toasted the forthcoming child.
Maria listened in disbelief as Fotini described these recent events.
‘I can’t believe she hasn’t made a point of going to see Father,’ she said. ‘She never thinks of anyone but herself, does she? Do I tell him, or wait until she gets round to it?’
‘If I were you, I would tell him. Otherwise he’s bound to hear it from someone else.’
They sat in silence for a while. The expectation of a child was normally a cause for great excitement, especially among women and close relations. Not this time, though.
‘Presumably it’s Andreas’s?’
Maria had said the unsayable.
‘I don’t know. My hunch is that even Anna doesn’t know, but Antonis says that gossip is still rife. They were all happy to drink to the new baby’s safe arrival, but behind Andreas’s back there was plenty of whispering and speculation.’
‘That’s not really surprising, is it?’
The two women talked for a while longer. This significant family development had swept other events aside and temporarily diverted Maria’s thoughts from Kyritsis and his gallant behaviour the week before. For their first meeting in many weeks, Fotini found she was not listening to Maria’s continual chatter about the doctor. ‘Doctor Kyritsis this, Doctor Kyritsis that!’ she had teased Maria who had turned the colour of a mountain poppy when Fotini pointed out this slowly growing obsession.
‘I’ll have to tell Father about Anna as soon as I can,’ said Maria. ‘I’ll tell him as though it’s the best news ever and say Anna has been too sick to come and see him. It’s half true anyway.’
When they got back to the quayside, Giorgis had offloaded all the boxes he was delivering and was sitting on the wall under the tree, quietly smoking a cigarette and surveying the view.
Though he had sat here a thousand times, weather and light combined together to produce a different picture every day. Sometimes the barren mountains that rose up behind Plaka would be blue, sometimes pale yellow, sometimes grey. Today, with the low clouds across the landscape, they were not visible at all. Parts of the sea’s surface were whipped up by wind, creating areas of light spray that swirled about across the water like steam. The ocean was masquerading as a seething cauldron of boiling water, but in reality it was as cold as ice.
The sound of the women’s voices disturbed him from his reverie, and he stood up to get the boat ready to go. His daughter hastened her step.
‘Father, don’t rush away. There’s some news. Some really good news,’ she said, doing her best to sound enthusiastic. Giorgis paused. The only good news he ever hoped for was that Maria might one day say she could come home. It was the only thing in the world he prayed for.
‘Anna is having a baby,’ she said simply.
‘Anna?’ he said vaguely, as though he had almost forgotten who she was. ‘Anna,’ he repeated, staring at the ground. The truth was that he had not seen his elder daughter for over a year. Since the day that Maria had started her life on Spinalonga, Anna had not visited even once, and as Giorgis was persona non grata at the Vandoulakis home, contact had ceased. Initially this had been a source of great sadness, but with the passage of time, though he knew the paternal tie would always remain, he began to forget about his daughter. Occasionally he would wonder how two girls born of the same mother and father and treated the same way from the day they were born could turn out so differently, but that was about all the thought he had given to Anna of late.
‘That’s good,’ he said at last, struggling to find a response. ‘When?’
‘We think it’s due in August,’ replied Maria. ‘Why don’t you write to her?’
‘Yes, perhaps I should. It would be a good excuse to get in touch.’
What reaction should he have to hearing about the impending arrival of his first grandchild? He had seen several of his friends in a state of high exuberance when they became grandfathers. Only the previous year his greatest friend Pavlos Angelopoulos had celebrated the birth of Fotini’s baby with an impromptu session of drinking and dancing, and it seemed that the entire population of Plaka had descended on the bar to celebrate with him. Giorgis did not picture himself making merry on tsikoudia when Anna’s baby arrived, but it was, at least, an excuse to write to her. He would ask Maria’s help in composing a letter later that week, but there was no hurry.
Two days later it was time for Kyritsis’s visit. When he came to Spinalonga he had to rise at five a.m., and after his long journey from Iraklion the last few miles were full of anticipation for the taste of strong coffee on his lips. He could see Maria waiting for him, and today he inwardly rehearsed the words he was going to say to her. In his head he saw a version of himself that was articulate but full of passion,
calm but fired with emotion, but as he got off the boat and was confronted by the face of the beautiful woman he loved, he knew that he should not be so hasty. Though she looked at him with the eyes of a friend, she spoke to him with the voice of a patient, and as her doctor he realised that his dreams of confessing his love were but that. Dreams. It was out of the question to cross the barrier created by his position.
They walked through the tunnel as normal, but this time, to his relief, there was no one cheering him at the end of it. As usual the cups were on the table, and Maria had saved time by making the coffee before he arrived.
‘People are still talking about the way you saved us,’ she said, taking a pot off the stove.
‘It’s very nice of them to be so appreciative, but I am sure they’ll forget about it soon. I just hope those troublemakers keep away in future.’
‘Oh, I think they will. Fotini told me it was all sparked by the rumour that a local boy had been taken to Iraklion for leprosy tests. Well, the child and his father returned last weekend. They’d been on a trip to see the boy’s grandmother in Hania and decided to stay there for a few days. He wasn’t ill at all.’
Kyritsis, listening intently to Maria, resolved to keep his feelings under control. To do otherwise would be wrong, a transgression of his position.
‘We’ve had some very encouraging results from the drug testing,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Some of the patients are really showing an improvement.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Dimitri Limonias is one of them, and I was talking to him yesterday. He says he can already feel a change.’
‘Much of that could be psychological,’ said Kyritsis. ‘Being put on any kind of treatment tends to give patients a huge boost. Dr Lapakis is compiling a list of people from whom we will select the next group. Ultimately, we hope almost everyone on Spinalonga will be given the new drugs.’
He wanted to say that he hoped she would be on that list. He wanted to say that all his years of research and testing would be worthwhile if she was saved. He wanted to say that he loved her. None of those words came.
Much as he would have loved to linger in Maria’s pretty home, he had to leave. It was hard to face yet another seven days before seeing her again, but he would not tolerate bad time-keeping in himself or others and knew that they would be waiting for him up at the hospital. Wednesdays were like a shaft of sunlight in the darkness of a strenuous, overworked week for Dr Lapakis and Dr Manakis, and this made Kyritsis’s assiduous punctuality even more important. The extra workload that had been created for these two doctors in administering the drug therapy was taking them over the edge of endurance. Not only did they have to treat the patients who were in lepra reaction, but they also now had people who were suffering from the side-effects of the drugs. On many nights now, Lapakis was not leaving the island until ten o’clock, sometimes returning again at seven in the morning. Soon Kyritsis would have to consider increasing the frequency of his visits to Spinalonga to twice or even three times a week.
Within a couple of weeks, Dr Lapakis had shortlisted his next group of candidates for treatment. Maria was one of them. One Wednesday in mid-March, when the wild flowers were beginning to spread across the slopes on the north side of Spinalonga and the tight buds on the almond trees were bursting into blossom, Kyritsis went to find Maria in her house. It was six o’clock and she was surprised to hear a knock on the door at that time. She was even more amazed to see the doctor standing there, when she knew he was usually hurrying to meet her father in order to begin his long journey back to Iraklion.
‘Dr Kyritsis. Come in . . . What can I get for you?’
The evening light glowed burnt amber through the gauze curtains. It was as though the village outside was going up in flames, and for all Kyritsis cared at this moment, this could have been the case. To Maria’s surprise, he took both her hands.
‘You’re going to start treatment next week,’ he said, looking directly into her eyes and, with absolute certainly, he added, ‘one day you’re going to leave this island.’
There were so many words he had rehearsed, but when the moment came he declared his love with a soundless gesture. For Maria, the cool fingers that grasped hers and lightly pressed them were more intimate, more articulate, than any arrangement of words about love. The life-giving sensation of flesh on flesh almost overwhelmed her.
In all those hours of discussion when she and Kyritsis had sat together talking of abstract things, she had been aware that even in the chinks where silence crept in she felt complete and content. It was just like the feeling she got when she found a lost key or a purse. After the frantic search and then the discovery, there was a sense of peace and wholeness. That was what being with Dr Kyritsis was like.
She could not help comparing him with Manoli, whose flamboyant talk and flirtatious behaviour flowed out of him unchecked, like water from a burst pipe. On their very first meeting at the Vandoulakis home, he had grabbed her by the hands and kissed them as though he was passionately in love. Yes, that was just it: she knew with absolute certainty that Manoli had not been passionately in love with her, but with the idea of being passionately in love. And here was Kyritsis, who gave every indication of not recognising his own feelings. He had been much too busy and preoccupied with his work even to acknowledge the signs or the symptoms.
Maria looked up. Their eyes and hands were now locked together. His was a look that overflowed with kindness and compassion. Neither of them knew how long they stood like this, though it was enough time for one era of their lives to end and another to begin.
‘I will see you next week,’ Kyritsis said finally. ‘By then I hope Dr Lapakis will have given you a date for starting treatment. Goodbye, Maria.’
As he left her house, Maria watched Kyritsis’s slight frame until it disappeared round the corner and out of sight. She felt she had known him for ever. It was in fact more than half her life ago that she had first set eyes on him, when he came to visit Spinalonga in the days before the German occupation. Though he had made little impression then, she now found it hard to remember what it had felt like not to love him. What had lived in that great space that Kyritsis now occupied?
Though no recognisable words of love had been spoken between Maria and the doctor, there was still plenty to tell Fotini. When she arrived the following Monday, it was patently obvious to her that something had happened to her oldest friend. Theirs was a friendship that could pick up a subtle sign of mood change; the merest hint of unhappiness or ill-health was always betrayed in hair that seemed dull, skin that was sallow or eyes that lacked their usual sparkle. Women noticed these things in each other, just as they noticed a gleam in the eye or a lingering smile. Today Maria was radiant.
‘You look as though you have been cured,’ Fotini joked, putting her bag down on the table. ‘Come on, tell me. What’s happened?’
‘Dr Kyritsis—’ Maria began.
‘As if I couldn’t have guessed,’ teased Fotini. ‘Go on . . .’
‘I don’t know what to tell you, really. He didn’t even say anything.’
‘But did he do anything?’ urged Fotini, with the fervour of a friend eager for detail.
‘He held my hands, that’s all, but it meant something. I’m sure of it.’
Maria was conscious that hand-holding might sound insignificant to someone who was still part of the great outside world, but even on mainland Crete a certain formality between men and women was still the norm for unmarried people.
‘He said that I would be starting treatment soon and that I might one day leave this island . . . and he said it as though he cared.’
All of this might have seemed feeble evidence of love. Fotini had never even met Kyritsis properly, so who was she to judge? In front of her, though, she had the sight of her greatest friend suffused with happiness. That much was very real.
‘What would people here think if they knew there was something between you and the doctor?’ Fotini was practical. She knew
how small-town people talked, and Spinalonga was no different from Plaka, where a relationship between a doctor and his patient would keep the gossips on their doorsteps well into the small hours.
‘No one must be allowed to know. I’m sure that a few people have noticed him coming out of my house on Wednesday mornings, but nobody has said anything. At least not to my face.’
She was right. A handful of people with vicious tongues had tried to spread the word, but Maria was well liked on the island, and malicious talk only tended to stick when someone was already halfway to being unpopular. What concerned Maria more than anything was that people might think she was getting preferential treatment; first place in a queue for injections, for example, or some other kind of perk, however meagre, would be enough to spark jealousy. That would reflect badly on Kyritsis and she was determined to ensure that no criticism attached itself to him. People like Katerina Papadimitriou, who had proved rather interfering, had seen Kyritsis leave her house on many occasions, and for someone who wanted to be in control of everything around her, this was disturbing. The leader’s wife had done all she could to find out from Maria why Kyritsis came, but Maria had been deliberately unforthcoming. She had a right to her privacy. The other source of trouble was Kristina Kroustalakis, the unofficial town-crier, whose attempts to discredit Maria in some way had continued relentlessly for the past year. She went into the kafenion every evening and, on the basis of no evidence at all, dropped hints to anyone she met that Maria Petrakis was not to be trusted.
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