‘Please,’ he said. ‘Come as often as you wish. I can’t tell you how delighted I would be. Tell me what you’d be doing exactly.’
‘Well,’ said Kyritsis, taking off his jacket and hanging it carefully over the back of the chair, ‘there are people in the field of leprosy research who are sure that we are getting closer to a cure. I’m still attached to the Pasteur Institute in Athens and our director-general is very keen on pushing things forward as fast as we can. Imagine what it would mean, not just to the hundreds of people here but to thousands around the world - millions even in India and South America. The impact of a cure would be enormous. In my cautious opinion we’re still a long way off, but every piece of evidence, every case study, helps build a picture of how we can prevent the disease spreading.’
‘I’d like to think you’re wrong about it being a long way off,’ responded Lapakis. ‘I’m under such pressure these days to use quack remedies. These people are so vulnerable and they’ll grasp at any straw, particularly if they have the resources to pay. So what’s your plan here exactly?’
‘What I need are a few dozen cases that I can monitor very minutely over the next few months, even years, if it works out that way. I’ve been rather stuck in Iraklion on the diagnosis side and after that I lose my patients because they all come here! Nothing could be a better outcome for them from what I’ve seen, but I need to do some follow-ups.’
Lapakis was smiling. This was an arrangement that would suit them both equally. Along one wall of his office, reaching from floor to ceiling, were rows of filing cabinets. Some contained the medical records of every living inhabitant of Spinalonga. Others were where the records were transferred when they died. Until Lapakis had volunteered to work on the island, no papers had been kept. There had scarcely been any treatment worth noting and the only progress had been towards gradual degeneration. All that remained to remember the lepers by during the first few decades of the colony’s existence was a large black ledger listing name, date of arrival and date of death. Their lives were reduced to a single entry in a macabre visitors’ book and their bones now lay jumbled and indistinguishable under the stone slabs of the communal graves on the far side of the island.
‘I’ve got records of everyone who has been here since I came in 1934,’ said Lapakis. ‘I make detailed notes on their state when they arrive, and record every change as it happens. They’re in age order - it seemed as logical a way as any. Why don’t you go through them and pull out the ones you’d like to see, and when you next visit I can make appointments for them to come and meet you.’
Lapakis tugged open the heavy top drawer of the cabinet nearest to him. It overflowed with papers, and with a sweep of his arm he gave Kyritsis an open invitation to browse.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘I’d better get back to the ward. Some of the patients will be in need of attention.’
An hour and a half later, when Lapakis returned to his office, there was a stack of files on the floor; the name on the front of the top one was ‘Eleni Petrakis’.
‘You met her husband this morning,’ commented Lapakis. ‘He’s the boatman.’
They made a note of all the chosen patients, had a brief discussion about each and then Kyritsis glanced at the clock on the wall. It was time to go. Before he entered the disinfectant room to spray himself - though he knew this measure to try and limit the spreading of bacteria was futile - the two men shook hands firmly. Lapakis then led him back down the hill to the tunnel entrance, and Kyritsis continued alone to the quayside, where Giorgis was waiting, ready to take him on the first stage of his long journey back to Iraklion.
Few words were exchanged on the return journey to the mainland. It seemed that they had run out of things to say on the way over. When they reached Plaka, however, Kyritsis asked Giorgis whether he could be there on the same day the following week to take him across to Spinalonga. For some reason he could not quite fathom, Giorgis felt pleased. Not just because of the fare. He was simply glad to know that the new doctor, as he thought of him, would be back.
Through the bitter cold of December, the arctic temperatures of January and February and the howling gales of March, Nikolaos Kyritsis continued to visit every Wednesday. Neither he nor Giorgis was a man for small talk, but they did strike up short conversations as they crossed the water to the leper colony.
‘Kyrie Petrakis, how are you today?’ Kyritsis would ask.
‘I’m well, God willing,’ Giorgis would reply with caution.
‘And how is your wife?’ the doctor would ask, a question that made Giorgis feel like a man with an ordinary married life. Neither of them dwelt on the irony that the person asking the question knew the answer better than anyone.
Giorgis looked forward to Kyritsis’s visits, and so did twelve-year-old Maria, as they brought a hint of optimism and the possibility that she might see her father smile. Nothing was said, it was just something she could sense. In the late afternoon she would go to the quayside and wait for them to return. Wrapping her woollen coat tightly around her, she would sit and watch the little boat making its way back across the water in the greyness of dusk, catching the rope from her father and tying it expertly to the post to secure it for the night.
By April, the winds had lost their bite and there was a subtle change in the air. The earth was warming up. Purple spring anemones and pale pink orchids had broken through, and migrating birds flew over Crete making their way back from Africa after winter. Everyone welcomed the change of season and the keenly anticipated warmth that would now arrive, but there were also less positive changes in the air.
War had raged in Europe for some time, but that very month Greece itself was overrun. The people of Crete were now living under the sword of Damocles; the colony’s newspaper, The Spinalonga Star, carried regular bulletins on the situation, and the newsreels that came with the weekly film stirred the population into a state of anxiety. What they feared most then happened: the Germans turned their sights on Crete.
Chapter Eight
‘MARIA, MARIA!’ SCREAMED Anna from the street below her sister’s window. ‘They’re here! The Germans are here!’ There was panic in her voice, and as Maria galloped two steps at a time down the stairs, she fully expected to hear the sound of steel-tipped boots marching down the central street of Plaka.
‘Where?’ Maria demanded breathlessly, colliding with her sister in the street. ‘Where are they? I can’t see them.’
‘They’re not right here, you idiot,’ retorted Anna. ‘Not yet anyway, but they are here on Crete and they could be coming this way.’
Anyone who knew Anna well would have spotted a hint of excitement in her voice. Her view was that anything that broke the monotony of an existence governed by the predictable pattern of the seasons and the prospect of living the rest of her life in this same village was to be welcomed.
Anna had run all the way from Fotini’s house, where a group of them had been gathered around a crackling radio. They had just about made out the news that German paratroopers had landed in the west of Crete. Now the girls both raced to the village square where, at times like this, everyone would gather. It was late afternoon but the bar was overflowing with men and, unusually, women, all clamouring to listen to the radio, though of course drowning much of it out with their din.
The broadcast information was stark and limited. ‘At around six o’clock this morning a number of paratroopers landed on Cretan soil near the airfield of Maleme. They are all believed to be dead.’
It seemed after all that Anna was wrong. The Germans had not really arrived at all. As usual, thought Maria, her sister had overreacted.
There was tension in the air, however. Athens had fallen four weeks earlier and the German flag had fluttered over the Acropolis since then. This had been disturbing enough, but to Maria, who had never been there, Athens seemed a long way off. Why should events there bother the people of Plaka? Besides, thousands of Allied troops had just arrived on Crete from the
mainland, so surely that would make them safe? When Maria listened to the adults around her arguing and debating and throwing in their opinions on the war, her sense of security was reinforced by what they said.
‘They haven’t got a chance!’ scoffed Vangelis Lidaki, the bar owner. ‘The mainland’s one thing, but not Crete. Not in a million years! Look at our landscape! They couldn’t begin to get across our mountains with their tanks!’
‘We didn’t exactly manage to keep the Turks out,’ retorted Pavlos Angelopoulos pessimistically.
‘Or the Venetians,’ piped up a voice in the crowd.
‘Well, if this lot come anywhere near here, they’ll get more than they bargained for,’ growled another, punching a fist into his open palm.
This was not an empty threat, and all those in the room knew it. Even if Crete had been invaded in the past, the inhabitants had always put up the fiercest resistance. The history of their island was a long catalogue of fighting, reprisals and nationalism, and there wasn’t a single house to be found that was not equipped with a bandolier, rifle or pistol. The rhythm of life might have appeared gentle, but behind the façade there often simmered feuds between families or villages, and among males over the age of fourteen there were few untrained in the use of a lethal weapon.
Savina Angelopoulos, who stood in the doorway with Fotini and the two Petrakis girls, well knew why the threat was real this time. The speed of flight was the simple reason. The German planes that had dropped the paratroopers could cover the distance from their base in Athens to this island in not much more time than it took the children to walk to school in Elounda. But she kept quiet. Even the presence of the tens of thousands of Allied troops evacuated from the mainland to Crete made her feel more vulnerable than safe. She did not have the confidence of the menfolk. They wanted to believe that the killing of a few hundred Germans who had landed by parachute was the end of the story. Savina felt instinctively that it was not.
Within a week, the true picture was clearer. Each day everyone congregated at the bar, spilling out into the square on those late May evenings which were the first of the year when the warmth of the day did not disappear with the sun. A hundred or so miles as they were from the centre of the action, the people of Plaka were relying on rumours and fragments of information, and every day more pieces of the story would drift over from the west like thistle seeds carried on the air. It seemed that although many of the men who had dropped from the sky had died, some of them had miraculously survived and fled into hiding, from where they were now managing to take up strategic positions. The early stories had told only of spilt German blood and of men speared by bamboo canes, strangled by their own parachutes in the olive trees or dashed on to rocks, but now the truth emerged that a worrying number of them had survived, the airfield had been used to land thousands more and the tide was turning in the Germans’ favour. Within a week of the first landing, Germany claimed Crete as its own.
That night, everyone gathered in the bar once again. Maria and Fotini were outside, playing tick-tack-toe by scratching the dusty ground with sharp sticks, but their ears pricked up when they heard the sound of raised voices.
‘Why weren’t we ready?’ demanded Antonis Angelopoulos, banging his glass down on the metal table. ‘It was obvious they’d come by air.’ Antonis had enough passion for both himself and his brother, and at the best of times it took little to arouse it. Beneath dark lashes, his hooded green eyes flashed with anger. The boys were unalike in every way. Angelos was soft-edged in both body and mind, while Antonis was sharp, thin-faced and eager to attack.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said Angelos, with a dismissive wave of his pudgy hand. ‘That’s the last thing anyone expected.’
Not for the first time Pavlos wondered why his sons could never agree on anything. He drew on his cigarette and delivered his own verdict.
‘I’m with Angelos,’ he said. ‘No one imagined an air attack. It’s a suicidal way to invade this place - dropping out of the sky to be shot as you land!’
Pavlos was right. For many of them it had been little more than suicide, but the Germans thought nothing of sacrificing a few thousand men in order to achieve their aim, and before the Allies had organised themselves to react, the key airport of Maleme, near Hania, was in their hands.
For the first few days, Plaka went about its business as usual. No one knew what it would actually mean for them having Germans now resident on Cretan soil. For several days they were in a state of shock that it had been allowed to happen at all. News filtered through that the picture was bleaker than they had ever imagined. Within a week the 40,000 combined Greek and Allied troops on Crete had been routed and thousands of Allies had to be evacuated with huge numbers of casualties and loss of life. Debate at the bar intensified and there were further mutterings about how the village should prepare to defend itself for when the Germans came east. The desire to take up arms began to spread like a religious fervour. The villagers were not afraid of bloodshed. Many of them looked forward to picking up a weapon.
It became reality for the people of Plaka when the first German troops marched into Agios Nikolaos and a small unit was dispatched from there to Elounda. The Petrakis girls were walking home from school when Anna stopped and tugged her sister’s sleeve.
‘Look, Maria!’ she urged. ‘Look! Coming down the street!’
Maria’s heart missed a beat. This time Anna was right. The Germans really were here. Two soldiers were walking purposefully towards them. What did occupying troops do once they invaded? She assumed they went about killing everyone. Why else come? Her legs turned to jelly.
‘What shall we do?’ she whispered.
‘Keep walking,’ hissed Anna.
‘Shouldn’t we run back the other way?’ Maria asked pleadingly.
‘Don’t be stupid. Just keep going. I want to see what they look like close up.’ She grabbed her sister’s arm and propelled her along.
The soldiers were inscrutable, their blue gazes fixed straight ahead of them. They were dressed in heavy grey woollen jackets, and their steel-capped boots clicked rhythmically on the cobbled street. As they passed they appeared not to see the girls. It was as if they did not exist.
‘They didn’t even look at us!’ cried Anna, as soon as they were out of earshot. Now nearly fifteen years old, she was affronted if anyone of the opposite sex failed to notice her.
Only days later Plaka was given its own small battalion of German soldiers. At the far end of the village one family had a rude early morning awakening.
‘Open up!’ shouted the soldiers, banging on the door with their rifle butts.
Despite not having a word of common language, the family understood the command, and those that followed. They were to vacate their home by midday or face the consequences. From that day, the presence Anna had excitedly predicted was in their midst, and the atmosphere in the village darkened.
Day to day, there was little substantial news of what was going on elsewhere on Crete, but there was plenty of rumour, including talk that some small groups of Allies were moving eastwards towards Sitia. One night, as dusk fell, four heavily disguised British soldiers came down from the hills where they had been sleeping in an abandoned shepherd’s hut and strolled insouciantly into the village. They would not have received a warmer welcome had they appeared in their own villages in the Home Counties. It was not just the hunger for first-hand news that drew people to them; it was also the innate desire of the villagers to be hospitable and to treat every stranger as though he might have been sent from God. The men made excellent guests. They ate and drank everything that was offered, but only after one member of the group, who had a good grasp of Greek, had given a first-hand account of the previous week’s events on the north-west coast.
‘The last thing we expected was for them to come by air - and certainly not in those numbers,’ he said. ‘Everyone thought they would come by sea. Lots died immediately but plenty of them landed safely and then regrouped.’ The youn
g Englishman hesitated. Almost against his better judgement, he added: ‘There were a few, however, who were helped to die.’
He made it sound almost humane, but when he went on to explain, many of the villagers paled.
‘Some of the wounded Germans were hacked to pieces,’ he said, staring into his beer. ‘By local villagers.’
One of the other soldiers then took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and, carefully flattening it out, spread it on the table in front of him. Below the original printed German someone had scribbled translations in both Greek and English.
‘I think you all ought to see this. The head of the German air corps, General Student, issued these orders a couple of days ago.’
The villagers crowded round the table to read what was written on the paper.