‘I know it’s not fatal in every case,’ she said, almost defensively, ‘but it is always horribly disfiguring, isn’t it?’
‘Not to the extent that you might think,’ replied Fotini. ‘It’s not a rampantly fast-spreading disease like the plague. It sometimes takes ages to develop - those images you have seen of people who are so terribly maimed are of those who have suffered for years, maybe decades. There are two strains of leprosy, one much slower to develop than the other. Both are curable now. Your great-grandmother was unfortunate, though. She had the faster-developing of the two types and neither time nor history was on her side.’
Alexis was feeling ashamed of her initial reaction, humbled by her ignorance, but the revelation that a member of her family had been a leper had been a bolt out of the bluest of skies.
‘Your great-grandmother may have been the one with the disease, but your great-grandfather, Giorgis, bore deep scars too. Even before his wife was exiled to Spinalonga, he used to make deliveries to the island with his fishing boat, and he continued to do so when she went there. It meant that he watched on an almost daily basis as she was gradually destroyed by the disease. When Eleni first went to Spinalonga hygiene was poor, and though it improved a great deal during the time she was there, some irreparable damage was done in her early years. I shall spare you the details. Giorgis spared Maria and Anna from them. But you do know how it happens, don’t you? Leprosy can affect nerve endings, and the result of this is that you can’t feel it if you burn or cut yourself. That’s why people with leprosy are so vulnerable to inflicting permanent damage on themselves, and the consequences of that can be disastrous.’
Fotini paused. She was concerned not to offend this young woman’s sensibilities, but was also very aware that there were elements of the story that were nothing less than shocking. It was simply a case of treading carefully.
‘I don’t want your image of your mother’s family to be dominated by disease. It wasn’t like that,’ she added hastily. ‘Look. I’ve got some photographs of them here.’
On the big wooden tray propped against the coffee pot there was a tatty manila envelope. Fotini opened it and the contents spilled out on to the table. Some of the photographs were no bigger than train tickets, others were postcard size. Some were shiny, with white borders, others were matt, but all were monochrome, many faded almost to invisibility. Most had been taken in a studio in the days before the spontaneous snapshot was possible, and the stiffness of the subjects made them seem as distant and remote as King Minos.
The first photo Alexis focused on was one she recognised. It was the picture that her mother had next to her bed of the lady in lace and the platinum-haired man. She picked it up.
‘That’s your great-aunt Maria and great-uncle Nikolaos,’ said Fotini, with a detectable hint of pride. ‘And this one,’ she said, pulling out a battered picture from the bottom of the pile, ‘was the last picture taken of your great-grandparents and their two girls all together.’
She passed it to Alexis. The man was about the same height as the woman, but broad-shouldered. He had dark, wavy hair, a clipped moustache, a strong nose, and eyes that smiled even though the expression he maintained for this photograph was serious and posed. His hands seemed big in comparison with his body. The woman next to him was slim, long-necked and strikingly beautiful; her hair was wound into plaits which were coiled up on top of her head, and her smile was broad and spontaneous. Seated in front of them were two girls in cotton dresses. One had strong, thick hair worn loose about her shoulders and her eyes were slanted almost like a cat’s. She had mischief in her eyes and plump lips that did not smile. The other had neatly plaited hair, more delicate features and a nose that wrinkled as she smiled at the camera. She could almost be described as skinny and, of the two girls, was much more like the mother, with her hands held softly in her lap in a demure pose while her sister had her arms folded and glared, as if in defiance, at the person taking the photograph.
‘That’s Maria,’ said Fotini, pointing at the child who smiled. ‘And that’s Anna, your grandmother,’ she said, indicating the other. ‘And those are their parents, Eleni and Giorgis.’
She spread the pictures out on the table, and occasionally the breeze lifted them gently from its surface and seemed to bring them to life. Alexis saw pictures of the two sisters when they were babes in arms, then as schoolgirls, and then as young women, by that stage just with their father. There was also a picture of Anna arm in arm with a man in full traditional Cretan dress. It was a wedding picture.
‘So that must be my grandfather,’ said Alexis. ‘Anna looks really beautiful there,’ she added admiringly. ‘Really happy.’
‘Mmm . . . the radiance of young love,’ said Fotini. There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice that took Alexis by surprise, and she was about to quiz her further when another picture surfaced which seized her interest.
‘That looks like my mother!’ she exclaimed. The little girl in the photograph had a distinctive aquiline nose and a sweet but rather shy smile.
‘It is your mother. She must have been about five then.’
Like any collection of family photographs, it was a random selection that told only fragments of a story. The real tale would be revealed by the pictures that were missing or never even taken at all, not the ones that had been so carefully framed or packed away neatly in an envelope. Alexis was aware of that, but at least she had now been given a glimpse of these family members that her mother had kept so secret for so long.
‘It all began here in Plaka,’ said Fotini. ‘Just behind us, over there. That’s where the Petrakis family lived.’
She pointed to a small house on the corner, a pebble’s throw from where they sat sipping their coffee. It was a tatty, whitewashed building, as shabby as every other home in the ramshackle village, but charming nevertheless. Its plastered walls were flaking and the shutters, repainted time and time again since Alexis’s great-grandparents had lived there, were a shade of bright aqua that had peeled and cracked in the heat. A balcony, perched above the doorway, sagged under the weight of several huge urns from which flame-red geraniums cascaded downwards, as though making their escape through the carved wooden railings. It was typical of almost every home on every Greek island and could have been built at any time in the past few hundred years. Plaka, like any village lucky enough to have been spared the ravages of mass tourism, was timeless.
‘That’s where your grandmother and her sister grew up. Maria was my best friend; she was just over a year younger than Anna. Their father, Giorgis, was a fisherman, like most of the local men, and Eleni, his wife, was a teacher. In fact she was really much more than a teacher - she more or less ran the local elementary school. It was just down the road in Elounda, the town you must have come through to reach us here. She loved children - not just her own daughters, but all the children who were in her classes. I think Anna found that difficult. She was a possessive child and hated sharing anything, especially her mother’s affection. But Eleni was generous in every way and had enough time for all her children, whether they were her own flesh and blood or simply her pupils.
‘I used to pretend that I was another of Giorgis and Eleni’s daughters. I was always at their house; I had two brothers so you can imagine how my own home differed from theirs. My mother, Savina, didn’t seem to mind. She and Eleni had been friends since childhood and had shared everything from an early age, so I don’t think she worried about losing me. In fact, I believe she always harboured a fantasy that either Maria or Anna would end up marrying one of my brothers.
‘When I was little I probably spent more time at the Petrakis place than I did at my own, but the tables turned later on and Anna and Maria more or less lived with us.
‘Our playground at that time, and for our whole childhood, was the beach. It was ever-changing and we never tired of it. We would swim each day from late May to early October and would have restless nights from the unbearable grittiness of the sand that had hid
den in between our toes and then worked its way out on to our sheets. In the evenings we fished for our own picarel, tiny fish, and in the morning we’d go and see what the fishermen had brought in. The winters bring higher tides and there was usually something washed up for us to inspect: jellyfish, eels, octopus, and a few times the sight of a turtle lying motionless on the shore. Whatever the season, we would go back to Anna and Maria’s as it was getting dark and the fragrant smell of warm pastry often greeted us when we arrived - Eleni would make us fresh cheese pies and I’d usually be nibbling on one as I trudged up the hill to my own house when it was time for bed—’
‘It does sound an idyllic way to grow up,’ interrupted Alexis, beguiled by Fotini’s descriptions of this perfect and almost fairy-tale childhood. What she really wanted to find out, though, was how it all came to an end. ‘How did Eleni catch leprosy?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Were lepers allowed off the island?’
‘No, of course they weren’t. That was why the island was feared so much. Back at the beginning of the century, the government had declared that all lepers in Crete should be confined on Spinalonga. The moment that doctors were certain of the diagnosis, people had to leave their families for good and go there. It was known as “The Place of the Living Dead” and there was no better description.
‘In those days people did everything they could to conceal symptoms, mostly because the consequences of being diagnosed were so horrific. It was hardly surprising that Eleni was vulnerable to leprosy. She never gave a second thought to the risk of catching infections from her pupils - she couldn’t teach them without having them sitting close, and if a child fell in the dusty schoolyard she would be the first to scoop them up. And it turned out that one of her pupils did have leprosy.’ Fotini paused.
‘So you think the parents knew their child was infected?’ asked Alexis incredulously.
‘Almost certainly,’ replied Fotini. ‘They knew they would never see the child again if anyone found out. There was only one responsible action Eleni could take once she knew she was infected - and she took it. She gave instructions that every child in the school should be checked so that the sufferer could be identified, and, sure enough, there was a nine-year-old boy, called Dimitri, whose wretched parents had to endure the horror of having their son taken away from them. But the alternative was a great deal worse. Think of the contact that children have with each other when they play! They’re not like adults, who keep their distance. They scuffle and wrestle and fall in heaps on top of each other. We know now that the disease is generally only spread through persistent close contact, but what people were afraid of in those days was that the school in Elounda would become a leper colony in its own right if they didn’t pull out the infected child as soon as they possibly could.’
‘That must have been a very difficult thing for Eleni to do - particularly if she had that kind of relationship with her pupils,’ said Alexis thoughtfully.
‘Yes, it was awful. Awful for everyone concerned,’ replied Fotini.
Alexis’s lips had dried and she hardly trusted herself to speak in case no sound came. To help the moment pass, she moved her empty cup towards Fotini, who filled it once more and pushed it back across the table. As she carefully stirred sugar into the dark swirling liquid, Alexis felt herself being pulled into Eleni’s vortex of grief and suffering.
What had it felt like? To sail away from your home and be effectively imprisoned within sight of your family, everything that was precious to you stripped away? She thought not only of the woman who had been her great-grandmother, but also of the boy, both of them innocent of any crime and yet condemned.
Fotini reached out and put her hand on Alexis’s. Perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry to tell the story, without really knowing this young woman well enough. It was no fairytale, however, and she could not simply choose which chapters to tell and which ones to omit. If she trod too carefully now, the real story might never be told. She watched the clouds pass across Alexis’s face. Unlike the pale wisps that hung in the blue sky that morning, these were sombre and brooding. Until now, Fotini suspected, the only darkness in Alexis’s life had been the vague shadow of her mother’s hidden past. It had been nothing more than a question mark, nothing that had kept her awake at night. She had not seen disease, let alone death. Now she had to learn about them both.
‘Let’s go for a walk, Alexis.’ Fotini stood up. ‘We’ll get Gerasimo to take us out to the island later - everything will make more sense when we’re over there.’
A walk was exactly what Alexis needed. These fragments of her mother’s history and a surfeit of caffeine had made her head spin, and as they descended the wooden steps on to the shingly beach below, Alexis gulped in the salty air.
‘Why has my mother never told me any of this?’ she asked.
‘She had her reasons, I’m sure,’ said Fotini, knowing that there was so much more left to tell. ‘And perhaps when you get back to England she’ll explain why she was so secretive.’
They strolled the length of the beach and began to ascend the stony path lined with teasels and lavender that led away from the village. The breeze was stronger here and Fotini’s walk slowed. Though she was fit for a woman in her seventies, she didn’t always have her old stamina, and her pace became more careful and more faltering as the path began to steepen.
Occasionally she stopped, once or twice pointing out places on Spinalonga that came into view. Eventually they came to a huge rock worn smooth by wind, rain and its long use as a bench. They sat down and looked out to sea, the wind rustling the scrubby bushes of wild thyme that grew in profusion around them. It was here that Fotini began to relate Sofia’s story.
Over the next few days Fotini told Alexis everything she knew of her family’s history, leaving no pebble unturned - from the small shingle of childhood minutiae to the larger boulders of Crete’s own history. In the time they had together, the two women strolled along the coastal paths, sat for hours over the dinner table and made journeys to local towns and villages in Alexis’s hired car, with Fotini laying the pieces of the Petrakis jigsaw before them. These were days during which Alexis felt herself grow older and wiser, and Fotini, in retelling so much of her past, felt herself young again. The half-century that separated the two women disappeared to vanishing point, and as they strolled arm in arm, they might even have been mistaken for sisters.
Part 2
Chapter Three
1939
EARLY MAY BRINGS Crete its most perfect and heaven-sent days. On one such day, when the trees were heavy with blossom and the very last of the mountain snows had melted into crystal streams, Eleni left the mainland for Spinalonga. In cruel contrast to this blackest of events, the sky was brilliant, a cloudless blue. A crowd had gathered to watch, to weep, to wave a final goodbye. Even if the school had not officially closed for the day out of respect for the departing teacher, the classrooms would have echoed with emptiness. Pupils and teachers alike had deserted. No one would have missed the chance to wave goodbye to their beloved ‘Kyria Petrakis’.
Eleni Petrakis was loved in Plaka and the surrounding villages. She had a magnetism that attracted children and adults alike to her and was admired and respected by them all. The reason was simple. For Eleni, teaching was a vocation, and her enthusiasm touched the children like a torch. ‘If they love it they will learn it’ was her mantra. These were not her own words, but the saying of the teacher with fire in his belly who had been her own doorway into learning twenty years before.
The night before she left her home for ever, Eleni had filled a vase with spring flowers. She put this in the centre of the table and the small spray of pale blooms magically transformed the room. She understood the potency of the simple act, the power of detail. She knew, for example, that recollection of a child’s birthday or favourite colour could be the key to winning the heart and then the mind. Children absorbed information in her classroom largely because they wanted to please her, not because they were forc
ed to learn, and the process was helped by the way she displayed facts and figures, each one written on a card and suspended from the ceiling so it seemed as though a flock of exotic birds hovered permanently overhead.
But it was not just a favourite teacher who would be making her way over the water to Spinalonga that day. They were saying goodbye to a friend as well: nine-year-old Dimitri, whose parents had gone to such lengths for a year or more to conceal the signs of his leprosy. Each month there had been some new attempt to hide his blemishes - his knee-length shorts were replaced by long trousers, open sandals by heavy boots, and in the summer he was banned from swimming in the sea with his friends lest the patches on his back should be noticed. ‘Say you’re afraid of the waves!’ pleaded his mother, which was of course ridiculous. These children had all grown up to enjoy the exhilarating power of the sea and actually looked forward to those days when the Meltemi wind turned the glassy Mediterranean into a wild ocean. Only a sissy was afraid of the breakers. The child had lived with the fear of discovery for many months, always knowing in his heart that this was a temporary state and that sooner or later he would be found out.