Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  As she settled into a seat by the window, looking out at the teeming confusion of the bus station, she already knew that A was right about one thing. People here did not like silence. The woman next to her didn’t speak a word of English but, in spite of this, they communicated for at least an hour, before the old lady dozed off. In that time, Ellie learned about her children, what they all did and where they lived, and had eaten two stuffed vine leaves and a piece of fresh orange cake (a second slice lay on top of her shoulder bag, wrapped in a napkin). She caught a glimpse of the parcel nestling beneath her cardigan. She had planned to look at the notebook on the journey, but the warmth of the sun coming through the window and the steady rumble of the bus lulled her to sleep.

  It was only when the bus reached Nafplio nearly three hours later that she noticed she did not have her coat. It must still be on the plane. As she waited in the sunshine for her case to be offloaded from the belly of the bus, her annoyance with herself began to evaporate. With the heat on her back, she realised that heavy clothing would be an encumbrance here. She felt like a snake that had shed its skin.

  There was a row of taxis at the bus station, and her guidebook suggested that she needed to take one of these to reach her hotel in Tolon. Before doing so, she was impatient to see a little of Nafplio. Wheeling her small suitcase behind her, she set out towards the old town, following signposts which were, helpfully, written in English.

  She was soon in the main square, which she recognised immediately from the postcard. The sense of déjà vu made her smile.

  Well used to being alone, Ellie did not feel self-conscious as she took a seat in the first café she came to. She was served quickly and her cappuccino arrived promptly, along with a glass of iced water and two small, warm walnut biscuits. For the second time in a few hours, she experienced the Greek hospitality that A had mentioned so many times.

  As she sipped her coffee, she looked around her. It was a Friday, early evening. The square was thronging with people of every age, pushing buggies, riding bicycles, showing off on rollerblades, or just strolling, some arm in arm, older ones relying on sticks. The dozen or so cafés around the perimeter were all full. The mid-September evening was balmy.

  The package lay on the table in front of her. Putting her finger into the slit she had made earlier, she made a tear right across the top and pulled out the notebook. Stuffing the brown paper into the side pocket of her handbag, she turned it over in her hands. Postcards were somehow public, on show to anyone that picked them up, but a notebook? Was it like reading someone’s diary? Was it an invasion of privacy? It certainly felt like it as she nervously opened the cover. Flicking through, she saw that every page of the book was filled with the familiar black ink of A’s meticulous but sometimes indecipherable handwriting.

  With her forefinger, she absent-mindedly traced an S in the biscuit crumbs on her plate and gazed out across the square. The addressee was never going to have a chance to read any of this and so, with burning curiosity and only a little guilt, she turned to the first page.

  After the first few words she stopped, realising that it would be better to wait until she reached the hotel. Clutching the notebook to her chest, she got up and walked to the taxi rank. ‘Tolon,’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Hotel Marina.’

  Later that evening, on the small balcony outside her bedroom, she began once again.

  When I went to meet you that day at the little airport in Kalamata and you didn’t appear, I waited for twenty-four hours in case I had made a mistake and you were coming on the next plane. Or perhaps you had missed it and couldn’t get in touch. I suggested all sorts of reasons to myself. That night I slept on a seat behind the luggage trolleys. The cleaner swept the floor around my feet and even brought over a piece of spinach pie that his wife was about to throw out. She ran the kiosk and their son was the person at passport control – and, of course, it was a nephew at baggage security and then a cousin at the gate to check boarding passes. ‘Small airports are a family business in Greece,’ the cleaner told me with great pride.

  Early morning on the following day, I had to leave the Arrivals area. Even the word seemed to mock me. It was mid-September and there would be no more charter flights coming in from the UK, and no possibility that you would suddenly appear, as I had allowed myself to fantasise. You didn’t pick up when I phoned, but I knew that if something terrible had happened to you, then one of your friends would have called me.

  I sat for a while on a bench outside the airport, not knowing what to do or where to go. A few moments later my phone buzzed. There was a message. I was shaking so much as I reached into my pocket that my mobile fell to the ground. Through the spider’s-web mess of the shattered screen, I could just about make out the words: ‘She can’t make it. Sorry.’ I suppose you had dictated it to some friend. I stared at it in sickened disbelief for a few minutes and then rang the number. No reply. Several times I tried. Of course with the same result. ‘Anger’, ‘fury’, ‘rage’. Those words don’t get close to describing what I felt. They are just words. Puffs of air. Nothing.

  There were no further messages. Just a ‘Bon Voyage’ from my brother later that day.

  I could have gone straight back to Athens, but I couldn’t face driving back – along the same road that I had just travelled with such anticipation and excitement. I was numb, almost incapable of getting the key in the ignition. I had no real idea where I was going. I didn’t care. I have no idea how long I drove, but when I got to the sea I stopped. Right on the beach, where the road ran out, there was a sign saying ‘Rooms’. This was where I would stay.

  I did almost nothing in the days that followed except sit and gaze out at the Ionian. The waves were wild, endlessly rolling in and crashing on the sand, their mood reflecting the turmoil that I felt inside. It did not seem to subside. I could not eat or speak. Men are meant to be the stronger sex, but I have never felt so powerless. I think the sea would have dragged me in if I had got too close. Some days I would willingly have disappeared beneath the foam.

  I could not stand the torment of looking at my phone, over and over and over again, and seeing the blank and broken screen. So I took it out of my pocket and threw it as far into the ocean as I could. It was liberating. The moment I saw the splash, I had to accept that I would not and could not hear from you. I was cut off from you now, and cut off from the world, too.

  God knows what the nice couple who ran the place in Methoni thought of me, but they left me a plate of cold food each evening and took it away each morning. The wife put a bunch of fresh flowers in my room one morning and changed them when they wilted. All I could register was their kindness, but not much else. I did not feel hunger or thirst. Even temperature did not register with me. One day I stood under the shower until the water ran cold but realised I could feel nothing on my skin. My watch told me that an hour had passed. Despair had deprived me of all my senses. They were dark days. How I passed the time I don’t know, but somehow the hours went by. I had no awareness of how many days or weeks it was since my wait at the airport but, one day, the owner of the pension greeted me as I was on my way out to the beach. ‘Kalo mina,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Octomvris! It’s a new month!’ I had been there almost a fortnight.

  The schedule that I had mapped out for us seemed ridiculous now: a tour of the Peloponnese, then a ferry to Kithera, and from there another ferry to Crete before we flew back to Athens and then to London. You said you had exactly two weeks’ holiday to spare, and my meticulous planning would have made sure you were back in time. I had bought a ring while I was in Athens, a solitaire diamond from a shop called Zolotas. This is how much I had deceived myself. I had planned to propose to you against a blood-red sunset in the west of Crete. Even now, I sometimes find myself replaying a scene that never happened. I hope one day that it will fade from my mind for ever.

  That evening in Methoni (where I closed my shutters against the sunset), I had to make a decision: to return to London, or to travel alone. My
research in Athens during the two weeks I was there had gone well. The curator at the Museum of Cycladic Art had been wonderful, opening up so many parts of the archive for me, so I had plenty of material to start writing my book. I could do this in a hotel room as easily as at home. The thought of London slightly chilled my blood, as I knew I would be looking for your face in every crowd. Another good reason for staying in Greece for a while would be to avoid the melancholy of a British autumn.

  So I packed my bag and checked out. I was in no hurry now. I called my brother from a phone box in the village and asked him to pick up my post once a week and deal with any bills. I did not know how long I would be away. The advance from my book contract would last me a year, if I was careful. Before going into the general store to get chocolate, chewing gum, some water and a few other things I needed for the road, I paused at a rusty carousel where a few desultory postcards were displayed. The shopkeeper was probably not expecting many more tourists now, so he had not bothered to replenish his stock. I picked out one of the Venetian Castle (which, in all those days there, I had not even bothered to visit). Why did I do that? I didn’t imagine that you cared about where I was, but I had a sudden desire to communicate with you. Perhaps it was simply to break through the silence that now existed between us. Or was it just to alleviate my loneliness? I couldn’t be the person playing with a mobile and appearing to have friends and arrangements, but I could be the man busy writing a postcard and needing to find a stamp.

  It would be a way to ‘talk’ to you without expecting any reply, a one-way conversation. The idea pleased me. Perhaps you might even regret that you had not come.

  The man in the shop put several stamps on the card for me then packed up the other things I had bought.

  ‘Kalo taksidi.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied. It was one of the few phrases I already knew. He was wishing me a good journey.

  I rested the card on the roof of the car, scribbled a few lines to you and tossed it into the nearby postbox.

  I was totally at liberty to go anywhere I pleased, but it is strange how discombobulating such freedom can be. I sat in the car for at least an hour, staring at the map, and it took all my will to put the car in gear and drive. I knew I was heading east because the sea was behind me, but I had no fixed destination and no idea where instinct or fate would take me. It was the beginning of my travels. This was all I knew.

  In the following weeks and months, everywhere I stopped people talked to me. Most were warm and kind and, if they were not immediately so, then my attempts to speak Greek would often break the ice. Many of them told me stories. I listened and noted it down, each day learning surprising things about this country, and new things about myself. The voices of strangers poured into the void, filling the silence you’d left.

  You will recognise some of the locations in the stories from the postcards. Who knows if the tales people told me are true or false? I suspect that some of them are complete fabrications, others are exaggerations – but perhaps some of them are real. You can decide.

  October 2015

  The beauty of the Peloponnese, where my travels really began, did not soothe my pain. It only made me ache all the more. I felt scorned by its fullness, its lushness, the way that nature herself seemed bursting with life and health. The landscape was the very opposite of my mood, and nothing distracted me from the longing I felt. I had nurtured so many hopes about our future and it was impossible to stop myself returning to them. I learned over the following months that trying to forget can only make you remember all the more. In the evening, I drank to anaesthetise myself and to help me sleep, but soon I even began to dread going to bed. Sleep was like a deep, dark well where nightmares pulled me ever downwards. The owners of the guesthouse in Methoni had rushed into my room at four one morning. My screams had led them to believe that I was being murdered. You were in every dream. But they were bad dreams. Sad dreams. My subconscious was not going to let me forget you. At least, not yet.

  It was not a mistake, though, to embark on this journey. Wherever I was, my unhappiness would have followed me. If I had returned to London, it would have been worse, since my friends would be looking at me with sympathetic death-in-the-family eyes but within a few weeks would be expecting me to have gone back to my usual self. Here, I could be with strangers and, if I moved around enough, people would never know what that ‘usual self’ looked like. I could reinvent myself completely with people who knew nothing of what had happened. Away from home, I could at least pretend to be a man in control.

  People always want to direct a visitor to their favourite place, and my hosts in Methoni had been insistent about Nafplio. ‘It’s the most beautiful city in Greece, and the most romantic,’ they told me.

  I forced a smile as they pointed out its location on a map.

  Whether or not Nafplio is the loveliest city in Greece, it captivated me. Its platia is the most glorious town square I have ever seen. Think of an enormous ballroom open to the sky. The marble paving stones are smooth and gleamingly clean and, even on a cool autumn evening, beautiful buildings on all four sides protect you from the slightest breeze. The walls of this ‘room’ are a montage of Greek history: a former mosque from the sixteenth century, a Venetian arsenal, graceful neoclassical buildings and some reasonable twentieth-century architecture. Situated on the sea, with three castles and a history that stretches right back to ancient times, Nafplio was the first capital of the modern state of Greece, from 1829 until 1834, and it feels like somewhere that matters.

  I spent many hours there, watching the world go by.

  I was glad of some conversation on one of my evenings in Nafplio, but the couple that spoke to me could not help commenting on the fact I was alone.

  ‘Your wife …’ asked the woman. ‘Isn’t she with you?’

  So many assumptions were made in this question, but I did not bother to address them. Fortunately, her husband stepped in, sensing that his wife had been a little blunt.

  ‘Ever since the Adamakos affair,’ he said, ‘people in Nafplio have been a little wary of men who sit all on their own.’

  ‘The Adamakos affair?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t suppose it made the English news,’ he said.

  He was right, of course. Stories about Greece in the British press tend to be about the economy or, nowadays, the refugee crisis. They don’t take much notice of anything else.

  ‘Well, there was a man who frequently sat here alone,’ he said.

  ‘For twenty-five years!’ said his wife, to emphasise the point.

  ‘It was a big story here …’

  ‘He didn’t like people?’ I suggested.

  ‘There were certainly people he wasn’t fond of,’ said the wife cryptically.

  ‘He was from the Mani,’ the husband added darkly, leaning forward in case anyone overheard.

  I had never been to the Mani, the remote area of land south of Nafplio, but I knew that in former times Maniots had a reputation for pursuing vendettas if their honour was disrespected. I had read something just that day about a dramatic event that took place in the early nineteenth century, close to the café where we sat. Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of the new state, had arrested members of an important but rebellious clan from the Mani. In revenge, two of their relatives lay in wait for him as he was going to church. A first gunshot missed. Kapodistrias was then stabbed, and a second bullet hit him in the head. Violence bred violence. The assassins were executed shortly afterwards.

  ‘You know that the bullet is embedded in the church of St Spyridon, just round the corner?’ he said, pointing to a stone staircase leading to the street above us.

  ‘I saw it today,’ I answered.

  ‘Well, never disrespect anyone from the Mani,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of blood feuds that have lasted into modern times.’

  Then he told me this story. By the end of it, I knew I would follow his advice.

  THE BOY IN THE SILVERY SUIT

  Th
e immense square in Nafplio is the beating heart of the city. People flow in and out all day, to talk, to play, to watch, to drink, and at weekends there is hardly a spare seat in a café.

  As if drawn by gravitational pull, couples of all ages file down the narrow, car-free Venetian streets, promenading two by two, like creatures from the ark. One old couple has taken a volta round the square each evening for five decades, always at the rate of a ticking clock. Even though the man relies on a stick these days, their pace has not changed.

  Close behind are two handsome men, one younger than the other. In other cities, they might feel free to walk arm in arm. One has an extravagance of white hair like a Persian cat, the other is closely cropped like a vole. They are casually but expensively dressed, with pastel cashmere pullovers draped over their shoulders and knotted in front. They take a place at one of the newer café-bars. These are wealthy weekenders from Athens.

  A heavily pregnant woman and her husband are making a slower circuit of the square. She is several days overdue and hoping that the rhythm of her walk will stir the baby to begin his journey into the outside world. Each step is an effort, and even now she worries that she may not complete the tour.

  A pair of men watch football in the café. One of them stands up with excitement each time anyone from his team gets close to the goal, almost knocking the table over, before calmly resuming the conversation with his friend. The latter is less bothered. Neither team is his.

  A couple of small boys kick a ball, frantically running after it as it rolls away down the steep rake of the square. Two dogs chase each other, then chase their own tails, yapping and barking and spinning. One of them goes after the boys’ football.

  There are two women, over-scented, overdressed, hair freshly coiffed for this day. They are not twins or sisters but over the years they have grown alike, with the same bleached hair, and similar lines on their faces. The name they share, Dimitra, gives them a common saint’s day and now, in late October, they are celebrating their yiorti and receive many greetings of ‘Hronia Polla! Many happy returns!’ from friends they meet in the square.