The Island (43 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
‘Let’s go into my office and I’ll put you in the picture.’
On Lapakis’s desk was a tower of files. He picked them up one by one and gave his friend and colleague a brief description of the current state of each patient receiving the drug treatment. Most of the fifteen were showing signs of a positive reaction, though not all.
‘Two of them are in a severely reactive state,’ said Lapakis. ‘One of them has had a temperature of around 104 degrees since you last came, and Athina just told me that the other kept the whole island awake last night with her screams. She keeps asking me how she can have no sensation in her arms and legs and yet feel such terrible pain. I haven’t got an answer for her.’
‘I’ll take a look at her in a minute, but I think the best thing now would be to withdraw the treatment. There’s a good chance that there might be some spontaneous healing and the sulphone could do some damage if that’s the case.’
When they had taken a brief look through the notes, it was time for the two doctors to do the ward rounds. It was a grim business. One of the patients, who was covered with pus-filled swellings, wept in sheer agony as Lapakis applied a solution of trichloracetic acid to dry the lesions. Another listened quietly as Kyritsis suggested that the best way of dealing with the dead bones in his fingers would be amputation, a simple operation which could be done without anaesthetic, such was the absence of physical sensation in that part of the body. For another there was a visible surge of optimism as Lapakis described the tendon transplant he planned to do on his foot to enable him to walk again. At each bedside, the doctors agreed with the patient what the next stage would be. For some it was the prospect of pain-relieving injections, for others it might be the excision of lesions.
The first of the outpatients then began to arrive. Some merely needed new dressings for their ulcerated feet, but for others the treatment was more gruelling, particularly for a woman who required the excision of a lepromatous growth in her nose and the application of a dozen adrenaline swabs in order to stem the bleeding.
All of this took until mid-afternoon, and then it was time to see the patients who were receiving the new treatment. One thing was becoming clear. Several months into the trial, the new doses of drug therapy were producing encouraging results and the side-effects which Dr Kyritsis had been wary of had not materialised among most of these cases. Each week he had been on the lookout for symptoms of anaemia, hepatitis and psychosis, all of which had been reported by other doctors involved in the administration of dapsone, but he was relieved that none of these were present here.
‘We’ve taken all our guinea pigs up from twenty-five to three hundred milligrams of dapsone twice a week now,’ said Lapakis. ‘That’s the most I can give them, isn’t it?’
‘I certainly wouldn’t recommend anything higher, and if that’s giving us these results I think we should regard it as the upper limit, especially given the length of time they’ll all be having the injections. The most recent directive is that we should continue to prescribe dapsone for several years after the patient’s leprosy has ceased to be active,’ said Kyritsis, adding after a pause: ‘It’s a long haul, but if it leads to a cure I don’t think any of them will complain.’
‘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.
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.
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.’
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