One August Night

by Victoria Hislop

  The four of them went out for dinner in one of the finest restaurants in Piraeus, to be paid for by Manolis. With the best bottle in the house, they raised their glasses.

  ‘To love,’ said Agathi.

  ‘To us,’ said Stavros, taking Agathi’s hand and putting the ring on her finger.

  ‘To your happiness,’ said Manolis.

  When he had taken a sip, he put his glass down, took one each of their hands and placed them together, with his on top. The moment seemed no less binding than a marriage ceremony.

  From then on, Agathi and Stavros lived as man and wife, with as much trust and love between them as anyone could have. They existed in a state of happy gratitude for having found each other, and Agathi’s boundless affection and bonhomie spilled over onto her tenant even more than before.

  For Manolis, this couple were more than friends. They were his family. He had never known such stability. He had never lived a life where someone cared as Agathi cared. When he returned to his room at night, there might be a jug of roses on his dresser, an ironed shirt lying on his bed, or his boots brightly polished beneath the window. Sometimes there was a sprig of lavender on his pillow to help him sleep. Always there was lunch waiting outside his door when he left for the boatyard in the morning, and when he came in after work there was a cheery greeting as he passed her door.

  Several times a week, Manolis ate with Agathi and her ‘husband’, but it was never an obligation. He passed most of each day with Stavros, but the two of them were always happy to spend another hour or so together. Changed out of their grimy overalls, they were different men, and enjoyed sitting at the same table to eat the irresistible dishes that Agathi set in front of them. She was putting on noticeable weight, something that Stavros and Manolis avoided thanks to the hard physical labour they engaged in each day.

  The three of them were always out on a Saturday night, when Agathi sang at the small bouzoúkia. The same audience came each week to hear her unchanging repertoire. But her love songs now had a specific focus, directed without embarrassment to the man in the front row.

  ‘Olo ton kósmo orízo kai ílio plimyrízo ótan sta mátia me koitás . . .’ she sang, gazing directly at Stavros. ‘When you look into my eyes, I hold all the world . . .’

  The ‘wedding’ sparked a change in Elli. It had motivated her to seek love for herself. Within the month, she had stopped going to the cinema with her aunt, and started going instead with the son of her employer at the zacharoplasteío. Philippos Papadopoulos would one day inherit the shop, so Agathi gave her plenty of encouragement. Manolis was relieved that the girl no longer blushed every time she saw him.

  Manolis wrote occasionally to Antonis and related any news in his life. Naturally, he told Antonis about the couple he lived with, and his recent role as their koumbáros, but he knew that his friend enjoyed technical detail more than personal, so he wrote mostly about the ship he was now working on.

  It was a luxury yacht, and Giannis had put half his team on the deck and half on the body. Manolis had shown real aptitude with wood. It required more skill than the hull, and great precision was needed even for the apparently simple job of mixing varnish with turpentine. That was not all. His tools included pumice stone and chamois skin, linseed and rottenstone, oil paint and shellac. All of them had to be used correctly, and he became a master of his craft. He found it more satisfying to work on the area of a boat that an owner would appreciate than the part that would largely be submerged beneath the waves and never seen. Nevertheless, he did sometimes reflect that it was strange to spend his days on the deck of a boat on which he would never sail.

  He always looked forward to Antonis’s replies, which still came irregularly. Antonis wrote that he occasionally saw Maria in town with little Sofia, and described to Manolis what she was like.

  She is very pretty, seems quite shy and if we meet in the street she hides in Maria’s skirts. But my sister tells me that she and Mattheos are very close friends and that she is quite talkative and noisy when they play together. She’s just started school. Maria has started training to work at the hospital and Dr Kyritsis is still travelling a lot.

  He assumed that Manolis would be interested to know about his goddaughter.

  What Antonis was really keen to write about was cars. The last vehicle Manolis had owned was the truck that probably still sat abandoned in Iraklion. Now that he was making plenty of money, he had more than enough to buy something new, and Antonis fuelled his appetite for a fast modern car. One day, on his friend’s advice, Manolis ordered an Alfa Romeo. In bright green.

  It lived in the street outside the pension, and he would often come home from work to find a gang of boys crowded around it. They all thought that someone with such a car had to be a film star. Manolis was sorry to disappoint them, but was happy with the attention this gleaming possession attracted.

  Life had become easy enough for him, and only occasionally did he wish that there was a woman in the passenger seat.

  Aside from the occasional letter from Antonis giving small glimpses of life in Agios Nikolaos, Crete seemed very remote to Manolis. His old life and the new were linked nowadays by only the finest of threads. Without the press cuttings of the trial and the baptism photograph, which were now together in his bottom drawer, he might have wondered if the past they recalled was really his.

  The photograph of his parents was in a frame and sat on his dresser, but the image of the baptism still caused him too much pain. Even without looking at it, there was no possibility that he would ever forget Anna. Sometimes he rested the single earring in his palm or held it up to the light. It must still bear a tiny trace of her.

  Chapter Eleven

  SOMETHING THAT ANTONIS’S letters never even alluded to were Maria’s visits to Andreas. Whenever he was writing to Manolis, the temptation was great, but a promise to his sister was unbreakable.

  Maria now went to the prison in Neapoli once a month. After that first time she took the earliest bus, which left Agios Nikolaos at six, so that she was nearer to the front of the line when she arrived. This allowed her a little longer with Andreas.

  Visits had not become less of an ordeal. The heat of the summer brought even more pungent smells of excrement, sweat and drains, and like most other visitors, she now held a handkerchief to her nose when she went in. She always folded some herbs into it, believing it might reduce the smell as well as alleviate the chances of picking up any infection.

  Each visit began with an encounter with the same officer, who always put on an act of false joviality, and she soon came to realise that a bribe of some kind was expected. Ostensibly, the two hundred drachma she handed over was to purchase a privilege of some kind for Andreas – additional bread, a clean shirt twice a week rather than once, and so on – but she suspected that this money went straight into the officer’s pocket. Andreas’s abject state was evidence of this. He had the same stains on his shirt from month to month and looked more emaciated each visit.

  Several visits in, the prison officer greeted her with his usual false bonhomie and she smiled back blandly, knowing this was the expected response. Nothing seemed to be different and she was expecting to be taken through to the visitors room as soon as he had made a note in Andreas’s file.

  ‘Kyría Kyritsis,’ said the officer, clearing his throat. ‘When a visitor comes as regularly as you, I am obliged to make spot checks. You understand that sometimes we discover goods are smuggled into this prison, and the only possible conduit is through the visitors.’

  Maria knew that she had nothing to hide, but nevertheless she felt a strong sense of unease. What did he mean, ‘spot checks’? She held out her handbag to him. He was more than welcome to take a look.

  He ignored the gesture.

  ‘Get up, please, and take off your coat.’

  Perhaps he was going to check her pockets too. She followed his instruction, standing up and placing her coat over the back of a chair.

  ‘Arms out . . .�
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  She stood there, dumbfounded. It was obvious that she was carrying nothing in her clothes. Her skirt did not even have pockets.

  To her astonishment and disgust, the officer began to run his hands over her body, first of all patting her down, then moving them over her breasts and belly and towards her thighs. He squeezed her buttocks gently at first, then more aggressively, all the while breathing his foul breath into her face.

  Then he lifted her skirt and slid a hand between her legs. Maria froze. Her eyes appealed to the young guard who stood in the corner, but she was sickened to see that he met her look with a leer. He was enjoying the spectacle.

  She held her breath and shut her eyes. It would be over soon. It had to be. After a few minutes and when there was no part of her body that the officer had not touched, he stopped. She was aware that he had stepped back because she could no longer smell the repellent mix of garlic and stale cigarette.

  She opened her eyes.

  ‘Delta 27,’ he barked at the guard.

  Despite the immensity of her disgust, anger and humiliation, Maria managed to suppress her need to vomit and calmly put her coat on. She did not look the officer in the face. With her legs shaking so violently she was not certain she could make it to the door, she picked up her bag and left.

  Afterwards, she could remember little of her time with Andreas. His expression of gratitude was as immense as ever, but all she could think of was getting away from this place.

  That night she said nothing to Nikos, but he sensed that she was in a strange mood.

  ‘Was everything all right today?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘It was fine,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your day.’

  She had managed to deflect his question, but she faced a great dilemma. Could she tolerate such an assault a second time? Would she risk it to see Andreas again?

  For the next couple of months, she made her excuses both to herself and to Andreas, in bland letters that simply apologised for her absence without providing any reason. Even Fotini asked her why she had not visited lately, but Maria skilfully covered up.

  One night, lying sleepless in bed and trying not to wake Nikos with her tossing and turning, she suddenly had an idea. It was so obvious that she could not imagine why she had only just thought of it.

  Two days later, she was on the bus towards Neapoli.

  She was not far from the front of the visitor queue that day, and in no time she was next in line to be admitted. Her heart was beating at twice its healthy pace and she clenched her fists to try and stop every part of her visibly shaking.

  ‘So,’ said the officer with insouciance, ‘tell me who you have come to visit.’

  ‘Andreas Vandoulakis,’ answered Maria, trying to quell the tremble in her voice.

  ‘Andreas Vandoulakis . . . Mmm. Ah . . . yes.’

  How she loathed this man. She could tell from the smirk on his face that he remembered exactly who she was and who she came to visit. He was enjoying this charade, that much was obvious.

  ‘I have a question . . .’ she said innocently.

  ‘A question?’

  She looked him straight in the eye, with uncharacteristic boldness.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Did you ever work on Spinalonga? As a guard, I mean?’

  She had rehearsed the words so many times in her head and even in front of a mirror.

  ‘What do you mean by that, Kyría?’ demanded the officer.

  ‘It’s just that you remind me of one of the guards we had,’ Maria answered. ‘You’re the spitting image. I was there, you see, for a few years, and—’

  ‘You’re a leper?’ he asked, with obvious disgust.

  ‘Well, not any more,’ Maria replied with a hint of a smile. ‘Not since the cure was found.’

  She tilted her head to one side to measure his reaction. It was exactly as she had hoped. She knew that he would never again lay a finger on her. For the first time ever, she had used stigma as a weapon. Nikos would be proud of her.

  That visit seemed to flash by. Andreas’s pleasure at seeing her made the effort she had gone to more than worthwhile. Their conversation followed a similar pattern as the preceding visits. Andreas asked about Sofia, and then about his father. Maria answered as best she could, with any details she could think of that would vary the response.

  She told him that Sofia had started school now, that she liked painting and enjoyed listening to stories, but there was a blankness in his eyes. It was such a vacant look that she contained her own enthusiasm. Of course he could not even imagine what his daughter looked like now. More than three years had passed since he had seen her, and she had probably changed beyond recognition in that time.

  Concerning Alexandros Vandoulakis, she tried to give full answers. She told Andreas what she knew about his relatively good health, how Olga and Eirini and their children went to see him most weekends, and even small changes that his housekeeper, Kyría Hortakis, had made in the arrangement of the furniture, plus any other trivia she could recall from her most recent visit there with Sofia.

  Andreas always enquired politely after Giorgos. All Maria could tell him was that he fished every day except when the winds blew too strongly, and even she did not have the skill to make this sound less repetitive than it was. She knew that Andreas had no interest in the life of Agios Nikolaos, and she found the details of the Vandoulakis estate hard to report on, especially now that Fotini’s brother Antonis was no longer connected with it.

  She rarely asked Andreas any questions. How could she enquire about his life in prison? She could see what the conditions were like, and the officer had confirmed the first time she visited that he shared a small cell with five others.

  Conversation was made harder because everything they said had to be shouted above the din and often needed repetition. As the bell sounded for everyone to leave, Andreas always leaned forward to say thank you, and even if she could not hear it clearly, she could read his lips. Each visit, she saw the same look of profound relief that she had noticed the very first time she came. To witness this gratitude in his eyes for being forgiven made her own sting with tears.

  That October evening, when Nikos returned from the hospital, Maria told him about her visit. His main concern was that she would pick up a disease when she went there.

  ‘That prison is full of sickness, Maria,’ he said. ‘And if the sanitation is as bad as you describe, it’s just not safe for you to go.’

  Maria smiled.

  ‘Agápi mou, I survived leprosy. I think I can protect myself from prison germs.’

  ‘As long as you are careful,’ he said gently. ‘And wash your hands as soon as you get home.’

  ‘You know I do, Nikos,’ she assured him. ‘I scrub them.’

  ‘And your clothes?’

  ‘The same. Until they are threadbare,’ she teased.

  It was a balmy night, and they were having dinner in their small garden. Nikos was due to leave for another medical conference the following day and would be away for a few weeks. She never complained about his dedication. How could she when he had saved her life and was now saving the lives of so many others? Nevertheless, she would miss him hugely, not only because she loved him, but also because Sofia was always harder to deal with when he was absent.

  ‘I worry so much about you going to that place,’ he said tenderly. ‘Even though I understand why you do it.’

  There was a pause as they looked up at the dazzling display of stars above them.

  ‘And have you thought more about telling Alexandros Vandoulakis that you visit? Will you?’

  This was Nikos’s other concern, and it was almost as great as the worry over his wife catching a disease from prison bacteria.

  ‘Can you imagine if he finds out that you visit his son and you have never mentioned it?’

  ‘But he never will find out. None of the family has ever been inside that place and Andreas isn’t permitted to write letters. So there is no communication.’ />
  ‘Just suppose that one day Alexandros decides to go. Then he will discover that you have been visiting. Imagine how he might react!’

  ‘I just don’t think it will ever happen, Nikos. I don’t think he would even manage to stand in that queue outside the prison for long enough. He’s quite frail now.’

  ‘Well I think it’s wrong that you go and see Andreas and then when you sit there chatting in Alexandros’s drawing room you never say anything. Doesn’t it weigh on your mind? Please tell him, agápi mou.’

  Nikos’s entreaty was strong and pricked Maria’s conscience.

  ‘You are right. I know you are,’ she admitted. ‘The next time I go, I’ll do it. I will find the right moment.’

  ‘Promise me?’

  ‘I promise.’

  Nikos went to pack for his trip and Maria cleared away their plates. While she was washing up, she contemplated when she would tell Alexandros about her visits.

  The following weekend she took Sofia to see Megálos Pappoús – Big Grandpa, as Sofia had named Alexandros. The child was too young to question why this grandfather was not the father of either of her parents. One day they would have to explain, but that day was a long way off. To differentiate the two grandfathers, Giorgos was known as Mousátos Pappoús, Bearded Grandpa.

  Sofia looked forward to these visits because the housekeeper, Kyría Hortakis, always prepared her favourite biscuits, and she never tired of running around the spacious house. Megálos Pappoús had also bought her a rocking horse, which lived in his drawing room, and she was happy to sit on it for hours at a time. Back and forth. Back and forth. She had named it after Alexander the Great’s horse, even though she could hardly pronounce the name, and in her mind she galloped far away across the mountains, wild and free, goading the beast to go faster and faster. With her wild curly hair flowing down her back, crying out ‘Bucefali, Bucefali!’ she never looked more like Anna than in those moments.

  Over the past few years, Alexandros Vandoulakis had grown fond of Maria Kyritsis. The reality was that he preferred her to her late sister, and there was no doubt in his mind that Maria was a more suitable mother. Anna’s name was never spoken out loud.