The Island (3 page)

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Authors: Victoria Hislop

BOOK: The Island
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Alexis (moussaka) did most of the talking. She described her projected trip with Ed, and her father (kalamari) occasionally interjected with suggestions on archaeological sites they might visit.
 
‘But Dad,’ Alexis groaned despairingly, ‘you
know
Ed’s not really interested in looking at ruins!’
 
‘I know, I know,’ he replied patiently. ‘But only a philistine would go to Crete without visiting Knossos. It would be like going to Paris and not bothering with the Louvre. Even Ed should realise that.’
 
They all knew perfectly well that Ed was more than capable of bypassing anything if there was a whiff of high culture about it, and as usual there was a subtle hint of disdain in Marcus’s voice when Ed came into the conversation. It was not that he disliked him, or even really disapproved of him. Ed was exactly the sort that a father was meant to hope for as a son-in-law, but Marcus could not help his feelings of disappointment whenever he pictured this well-connected boy becoming his daughter’s future. Sofia, on the other hand, adored Ed. He was the embodiment of all that she aspired to for her daughter: respectability, certainty and a family tree that lent him the confidence of someone linked (albeit extremely tenuously) with English aristocracy.
 
It was a light-hearted evening. The three of them had not been together for several months and Alexis had much to catch up on, not least all the tales of Nick’s love life. In Manchester doing postgraduate work, Alexis’s brother was in no hurry to grow up and his family were constantly amazed at the complexity of his relationships.
 
Alexis and her father then began to exchange anecdotes about their work and Sofia found her mind wandering back to when they had first come to this restaurant and Gregorio had stacked up a pile of cushions so that Alexis could reach the table. By the time Nick was born, the taverna had invested in a highchair and soon the children had learned to love the strong tastes of taramasalata and tzatziki that the waiters brought out for them on tiny plates. For more than twenty years almost every landmark of their lives had been celebrated there, with the same tape of popular Greek tunes playing on a loop in the background. The realisation that Alexis was no longer a child struck Sofia more strongly than ever and she began to think of Plaka and the letter she was soon to write. For many years she had corresponded quite regularly with Fotini and over a quarter of a century earlier had described the arrival of her first child; within a few weeks, a small, perfectly embroidered dress had arrived in which Sofia had dressed the baby for her christening, in the absence of a traditional robe. The two women had stopped writing a while back, but Sofia was certain that Fotini’s husband would have let her know if anything had happened to his wife. Sofia wondered what Plaka would be like now, and tried to block out an image of the little village overrun with noisy pubs selling English beer; she very much hoped Alexis would find it just as it was when she had left.
 
As the evening progressed Alexis felt a growing excitement that at last she was to delve further into her family history. In spite of the tensions she knew would have to be faced on her holiday, at least the visit to her mother’s birthplace was something she could look forward to. Alexis and Sofia exchanged smiles and Marcus found himself wondering whether his days of playing mediator and truce-maker between his wife and daughter were drawing to a close. He was warmed by the thought and basked in the company of the two women he loved most in the world.
 
They finished their meal, politely drank the complimentary raki to the halfway mark and left for home. Alexis would sleep in her old room tonight, and she looked forward to those few hours in her childhood bed before she had to get up and take the underground to Heathrow in the morning. She felt strangely contented in spite of the fact that she had singularly failed to ask her mother’s advice. It seemed much more important at this very moment that she was going, with her mother’s full co-operation, to visit Sofia’s birthplace. All her pressing anxieties over the more distant future were, for a moment, put aside.
 
When they returned from the restaurant, Alexis made her mother some coffee and Sofia sat at the kitchen table composing the letter to Fotini, rejecting three drafts before finally sealing an envelope and passing it across the table to her daughter. The whole process was conducted in silence, absorbing Sofia completely. Alexis had sensed that if she spoke the spell might be broken and her mother might have a change of heart after all.
 
 
For two and a half weeks now, Sofia’s letter had sat in the safe inner pocket of Alexis’s bag, as precious as her passport. Indeed, it was a passport in its own right, since it would be her way of gaining access to her mother’s past. It had travelled with her from Athens and onwards on the fume-filled, sometimes storm-tossed ferries to Paros, Santorini and now Crete. They had arrived on the island a few days earlier and found a room to rent on the seafront in Hania - an easy task at this stage of the season when most holidaymakers had already departed.
 
These were the last days of their vacation, and having reluctantly visited Knossos and the archaeological museum at Iraklion, Ed was keen to spend the few days before their long boat journey back to Piraeus on the beach. Alexis, however, had other plans.
 
‘I’m going to visit an old friend of my mother’s tomorrow, ’ she announced as they sat in a harbourside taverna waiting to give their order. ‘She lives the other side of Iraklion, so I’ll be gone most of the day.’
 
It was the first time she had mentioned her pilgrimage to Ed and she braced herself for his reaction.
 
‘That’s terrific!’ he snapped, adding resentfully: ‘Presumably you’re taking the car?’
 
‘Yes, I will if that’s okay. It’s a good hundred and fifty miles and it’ll take me days if I have to go on local buses.’
 
‘Well I suppose I don’t really have a choice, do I? And I certainly don’t want to come with you.’
 
Ed’s angry eyes flashed at her like sapphires as his sun-tanned face disappeared behind his menu. He would sulk for the rest of the evening but Alexis could take that given that she had rather sprung this on him. What was harder to cope with, even though it was equally typical of him, was his total lack of interest in her plan. He did not even ask the name of the person she was going to visit.
 
Not long after the sun had risen over the hills the following morning, she crept out of bed and left their hotel.
 
Something very unexpected had struck her when she looked Plaka up in her guidebook. Something her mother had not mentioned. There was an island opposite the village just off the coast, and although the entry for it was minimal, miss-able even, it had captured her imagination:
 
 
SPINALONGA: Dominated by a massive Venetian fortress, this island was seized by the Turks in the eighteenth century. The majority of Turks left Crete when it was declared autonomous in 1898 but the inhabitants refused to give up their homes and their lucrative smuggling trade on Spinalonga. They only left in 1903 when the island was turned into a leper colony. In 1941, Crete was invaded by the Germans and occupied until 1945, but the presence of lepers meant Spinalonga was left alone. Abandoned in 1957.
 
 
 
It appeared that the
raison d’être
of Plaka itself had been to act as a supply centre for the leper colony, and it intrigued Alexis that her mother had made no mention of this at all. As she sat at the wheel of the hired Cinquecento, she hoped she might have time to visit Spinalonga. She spread the map of Crete out on the empty passenger seat and noticed, for the first time, that the island was shaped like a languid animal asleep on its back.
 
The journey took her eastwards past Iraklion, and along the smooth, straight coastal road that passed through the insanely overdeveloped modern strips of Hersonisos and Malia. Occasionally she would spot a brown signpost indicating some ancient ruin nestling incongruously among the sprawling hotels. Alexis ignored all these signs. Today her destination was a settlement that had thrived not in the twentieth century BC but in the twentieth century AD and beyond.
 
Passing mile upon mile of olive groves and, in places where the ground became flatter on the coastal plains, huge plantations of reddening tomatoes and ripening grapes, she eventually turned off the main road and began the final stage of her journey towards Plaka. From here, the road narrowed and she was forced to drive in a more leisurely way, avoiding small piles of rocks which had spilled down from the mountains into the middle of the road and, from time to time, a goat ambling across in front of her, its devilishly close-set eyes glaring at her as she passed. After a while the road began to climb, and after one particularly sharp hairpin bend she drew in to the side, her tyres crackling on the gravelly surface. Way below her, in the blindingly blue waters of the Gulf of Mirabello, she could see the great arc of an almost circular natural harbour, and just where the arms of it seemed to join in embrace there was a piece of land that looked like a small, rounded hillock. From a distance it appeared to be connected to the mainland, but from her map Alexis knew this was the island of Spinalonga and that to reach it there was a strip of water to be crossed. Dwarfed by the landscape around it, the island stood proud of the water, the remains of the Venetian fortress clearly visible at one end, and behind it, fainter but still distinct, a series of lines mapped out; these were its streets. So there it was: the empty island. It had been continuously inhabited for thousands of years and then, less than fifty years ago, for some reason abandoned.
 
She took the last few miles of her journey down to Plaka slowly, the windows of her cheap rented car wound down to let in the warm breeze and the fragrant smell of thyme. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when she finally rattled to a halt in the silent village square. Her hands were glistening with sweat from gripping the hard plastic steering wheel and she noticed that her left arm had been scorched by the early afternoon sun. It was a ghostly time to arrive in a Greek village. Dogs played dead in the shade and a few cats prowled for scraps. There were no other signs of life, simply some vague indications that people had been there not long before - an abandoned moped leaning against a tree, half a packet of cigarettes on a bench and a backgammon set lying open next to it. Cicadas kept up their relentless chorus that would only be silenced at dusk when the fierce heat finally cooled. The village probably looked exactly as it had done in the 1970s when her mother had left. There had been few reasons for it to change.
 
Alexis had already decided that she would try to visit Spinalonga before she tracked down Fotini Davaras. She was enjoying this sense of complete freedom and independence, and once she had found the old woman it might then seem rude to go off on a boat trip. It was clear to Alexis that she would be pushed to get back to Hania that night, but just for now she would enjoy her afternoon and would deal with the logistics of ringing Ed and finding somewhere to stay later on.
 
Deciding to take the guidebook at its word (‘Try the bar in the small fishing village of Plaka where, for a few thousand drachma, there is usually a fisherman willing to take you across’), she made her way purposefully across the square and pushed aside the sticky rainbow of plastic strips that hung in the doorway of the village bar. These grubby ribbons were an attempt to keep the flies out and the coolness in, but all they actually did was gather dust and keep the place in a permanent state of semi-darkness. Staring into the gloom, Alexis could just about make out the shape of a woman seated at a table, and as she groped her way towards her, the shadowy figure got up and moved behind the bar. By now Alexis’s throat was desiccated with dust.
 
‘
Nero, parakalo
,’ she said, hesitantly.
 
The woman shuffled past a series of giant glass vats of olives and several half-empty bottles of clear, thick ouzo and reached into the fridge for some chilled mineral water. She poured carefully into a tall, straight-edged glass, adding a thick wedge of rough-skinned lemon before passing it to Alexis. She then dried her hands, wet with condensation from the icy bottle, on a huge floral apron that just about reached around her generous waist, and spoke. ‘English?’ she asked.
 
Alexis nodded. It was a half-truth after all. It took her just one word to communicate her next wish. ‘Spinalonga?’ she said.
 
The woman turned on her heel and vanished through a little doorway behind the bar. Alexis could hear the muffled yells of ‘Gerasimo! Gerasimo!’ and, soon after, the sound of footsteps on a wooden staircase. An elderly man, bleary-eyed from his disturbed siesta, appeared. The woman gabbled away at him, and the only word that meant anything to Alexis was ‘drachma’, which was repeated several times. It was quite clear that, in no uncertain terms, he was being told that there was good money to be earned here. The man stood there blinking, taking in this torrent of instructions but saying nothing.
 
The woman turned to Alexis and, grabbing her order pad from the bar, scribbled down some figures and a diagram. Even if Alexis had spoken fluent Greek it could not have been clearer. With the help of plenty of pointing and circular movements in the air and marks on the paper, she deduced that her return trip to Spinalonga, with a two-hour stop on the island, would cost 20,000 drachma, around £35. It wasn’t going to be a cheap day out, but she was in no position to negotiate - and besides, she was more committed than ever to visiting the island. She nodded and smiled at the boatman, who nodded gravely back at her. It was at that moment that it dawned on Alexis that there was more to the ferryman’s silence than she had at first realised. He could not have spoken even if he had wished. Gerasimo was dumb.

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