One August Night

by Victoria Hislop

  As they sipped their coffee and Sofia, totally absorbed, rocked on her horse, Maria knew that the moment had come. Since her first visit to Andreas, every trip to see Alexandros had been burdened by the unsaid, and Nikos was right. She had used many excuses to herself – that Alexandros might be displeased or angry, that it was the wrong thing to do, that it was not her place to go, and many more – but the time had come to tell him.

  There was no way that the subject could glide smoothly into conversation. She simply had to be bold.

  ‘I need to tell you something, Kýrie Alexandros,’ she said.

  The seriousness of her tone made him lean forward with concern.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’

  ‘I have been to visit your son. I have seen Andreas.’

  Alexandros looked astonished, and for a moment did not speak.

  Maria was so nervous that she had to put her coffee down on the table. The chattering of cup on saucer revealed her anxiety.

  ‘I w-went to see him in prison,’ she continued.

  ‘My . . . son?’

  The face of this dignified elderly man, a person who so rarely showed any emotion, crumpled.

  The housekeeper, Kyría Hortakis, sensing that something had happened, lured Sofia off her horse and into the kitchen for biscuits.

  The last time Alexandros Vandoulakis had spoken to his son was on that August evening three years ago when Andreas and Anna had agreed that they would go to the celebration in Plaka. Two days later came the terrible news. He and Eleftheria had eaten and were about to go to bed when the telephone rang. They both commented that it was unusually late for a call, and Eleftheria left the drawing room to pick it up. A moment later, Alexandros heard his wife scream, and hurried into the hallway, where he found her sitting on the chair next to the phone, sobbing. He took the receiver from her hand. Antonis, one of the estate workers, was on the other end of the line. Anna was dead and Andreas had been arrested.

  In one moment, a bullet had changed their lives.

  ‘You have seen Andreas?’ he asked quietly.

  It was the first time he had spoken his son’s name since that terrible night, and Maria could barely hear him say it now.

  ‘Yes.’

  Alexandros Vandoulakis, the proud and dignified owner of this great estate, a man who had kept control of his emotions since that August night, was weeping into his hands.

  It seemed overfamiliar given their formal relationship, but Maria got up and put her arm round him. It was instinctive. The man needed comforting.

  After a few moments, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and gradually composed himself. Maria could see that he needed time to recover and took her place opposite him again.

  Eventually he was ready to talk, and he was full of questions.

  ‘How is he? What does he look like? How does he manage? What is it like in there?’

  His relief at being able to speak about his son was palpable, and the gentle interrogation flowed on and on. Maria answered every question she knew the answer to, and told the truth unflinchingly.

  Eventually she could see the old man’s energy beginning to fail, and he sat back in his chair, emotionally spent. One question he did not ask was why she had gone to visit. It seemed to Maria that he understood. Perhaps there was a river of compassion flowing through him that she had not imagined. Only someone capable of forgiveness themselves would not find it necessary to ask.

  As the questions ended, Sofia came running in and raced towards her grandfather. The old man adored this little girl and gave her a hearty embrace.

  ‘It’s time to go now, Sofia,’ said Maria.

  ‘Mamá! I don’t want to go,’ protested Sofia. ‘I want to stay here with Bucefali!’

  ‘I’ll feed him and look after him for you, moró mou,’ said her grandfather kindly. ‘I promise.’

  Sofia gave him a hug and then took her mother’s hand.

  Maria felt a lightness that she had never experienced in this house before.

  Alexandros Vandoulakis got out of his chair and held her arm very gently.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Maria,’ he said. ‘It was lovely to see you. Please come again soon and bring me news.’

  She understood what he meant. She was certain that from now on, Alexandros Vandoulakis would be hungry for word of Andreas. Since the death of his wife, he had become much frailer, and when she touched his hand, she felt how bony it was. It made her reflect once again on the dangers of visiting that prison. She might be strong enough to resist illness and disease herself, but she was not so certain about this elderly man. She would have to be his ears and eyes in that hellish place.

  With Nikos away for a few weeks, Maria did not plan to visit Andreas until he returned. It was Sofia’s first full month at school and she had to take her each morning.

  It perturbed her to miss a month. She fretted that Andreas would feel abandoned by her again, and planned to go as soon as Nikos was back and could take their daughter to school.

  The still, calm days of late October gave way to a new season. November brought rains that were rarely seen in Crete, thunderstorms that blackened the skies mid morning and bright flashes of lightning that lit up the mountains behind Agios Nikolaos in the middle of the night. Several days running, Maria postponed her trip to the prison, but finally she woke one morning and was aware that the shutters were not rattling as they had been for so many days.

  She got out of bed, dressed quickly and whispered to Nikos:

  ‘I’m leaving to get the bus, agápi mou. Sofia’s clothes are all ready.’

  Nikos stirred.

  ‘Take care, Maria,’ he said sleepily.

  She bent to kiss him lightly on the ear and tiptoed from the room.

  As she left their house on the hill, she could see the sun slowly appearing over the horizon. It was a spectacular dawn. She walked quickly to the bus station, her breath making clouds on the chilly morning air, and regretted that she had not put on a thicker coat. She was the last to get on before the bus left promptly at six. She recognised a woman who had once worked at the hospital and politely acknowledged her with a nod. To her slight chagrin, the woman got up from her seat and came to sit closer to her. Maria noticed that she did not actually take the seat beside her, but preferred to shout above the grunts and groans of the bus from a few rows further forward.

  The woman now had a job at the orphanage in Neapoli and wanted to tell Maria all about it. Naturally she wanted information in exchange, in particular gossip from the hospital, what was Maria doing these days, how was Sofia, and so on.

  Apart from the fact that it felt a little early in the morning for conversation, Maria was unwilling to divulge too much about what she was doing and was determined not to say where she was going. She was aware that a hint of stigma continued to hang over her from her time on Spinalonga and concluded that this was why the woman kept her distance. If she revealed that she was visiting her sister’s murderer, it would be more than enough to make the woman get off the bus in the middle of nowhere. Maria had no time for such a person and the thirty-minute journey was awkward. She was happy to get off before her.

  She was close to the front of the queue that day. The weather must have deterred some of the other usual visitors. As she waited, she was full of anxiety. It was a while since she had seen Andreas, and she worried that he might think she had stopped coming. She paid the usual ‘pocket money’ for the prisoner and was shown in to the visitors room. Gradually the room filled up as other visitors and prisoners shambled in. The seat opposite Maria continued to be empty. She looked at the clock on the wall and saw that fifteen minutes had already passed. At any moment the bell would ring, and she felt a rising sense of disappointment. Against the regulations, she stood up and went to speak to the guard seated closest to her.

  The man did not give her time to ask a question.

  ‘If he comes, he comes. Even prisoners have some choices. Whether or not to come in here is one of
them. The other is whether to eat.’

  The guard did not look at Maria as he spoke, but straight past her towards the clock on the wall. Those who came to see prisoners merited no more respect than those they visited, and it was not the first time that she had felt the contempt of a guard. Everyone, whatever their relationship with a prisoner, was treated as if they too had been convicted of a crime.

  ‘Looks like he didn’t want to see you.’

  The guard’s words were blunt. It might have been the truth, but it was a truth that hurt.

  She returned to her seat for the remaining moments of the session. There was a small possibility that something had detained him. She could not imagine what that might be in this place, but she felt obliged to stay in any case.

  As the minute hand moved inexorably towards the hour, Maria struggled to hold back her tears. She made it out of the room, across the courtyard and into the road before she lost control of her emotions. Nobody took a second glance at a woman who cried in the street. It was a common sight outside these prison walls.

  It would be a whole month now until she could visit again, and there was no means of getting any information about him. Her imagination gave her no rest.

  Nikos was pragmatic.

  ‘Maria, if something bad has happened, I am sure they would communicate with his next of kin. And Alexandros would have contacted you. There is no question of that.’

  ‘But—’ protested Maria.

  ‘Please try not to worry,’ said Nikos gently. ‘There is nothing you can do. And next month will come soon enough.’

  When Maria took Sofia to see Megálos Pappoús at the end of that month, she did not tell him that Andreas had failed to turn up when she went to see him. She just answered his eager questions blandly and said that she had been allowed very little time with Andreas on the last visit. She hoped it would help justify why she had so little to say about him. Next month, she reassured Alexandros, she was sure to have a little longer with him.

  She was eager for the December visit to come. Andreas was always in the back of her mind.

  He soon appeared in front of her and she was relieved to see him, even though he looked thinner than ever. He explained that he had been very sick with suspected cholera and they had put him in isolation for so many days he had lost count.

  Time was galloping, as it always did in this place, and Maria was eager to tell him that his father now knew about her visits.

  ‘I have told your father I come to see you,’ she said, perhaps too quietly.

  He did not hear her the first time, and she found herself repeating the words. They were met with an unexpected blankness of response, so she decided to rephrase.

  ‘I went to see Kýrios Alexandros and—’

  It was the sound of the name that stirred Andreas, and he leaned forward, needing to check he had heard correctly.

  ‘Alexandros. My father?’

  ‘Yes. I told him that I come to visit you. It seemed only right.’

  Rejection by his father and the total withdrawal of parental love had been a blow to Andreas greater than incarceration itself. Both Eleftheria and Alexandros had idolised their only son, and he had basked in their love from the moment of his birth. At the moment he brought the family name into disgrace, this boundless supply of affection was cut off. Then, when the letter had come from his sister informing him that Eleftheria had died, her words left him in no doubt that he was responsible not only for the death of his wife, but for that of his mother too: You broke your mother’s heart, Andreas, and now your father is twice destroyed. Olga’s words had been like a knife in his side, and two years on he still bled from the wound.

  ‘What did he say? Tell me what he said, Maria.’ He was always eager for any news of his father, and this time even more so.

  ‘He asked how you were, what it’s like in here, all the things you might expect.’

  ‘So he wasn’t angry that you come . . .’

  ‘Of course not, Andreas. Perhaps the opposite.’

  Andreas’s relief at hearing this showed in his eyes. For a moment they glittered. Perhaps these were tears, even if they did not fall.

  The bell was ringing now and Maria was one of the last to leave. It was the first time she had left the prison feeling lighter than when she had arrived.

  The next time she visited Alexandros Vandoulakis, it was with both Nikos and Sofia. She knew that the old man loved to see her husband, and it was a delightful afternoon, with Sofia enraptured by Bucefali, as usual.

  ‘When you are a little older,’ her grandfather told the little girl, ‘you will ride a real horse.’

  ‘Silly Pappoús, he is a real horse,’ replied Sofia, who was busy combing its mane.

  Her parents sat and talked for a while, and Nikos told Alexandros about new developments at the hospital and the latest conference he had attended.

  Out of earshot of his granddaughter, Maria then told him about her recent visit to Andreas.

  ‘He seemed pleased that you know,’ she said.

  Alexandros looked thoughtful for a moment.

  ‘Next time you go,’ he said, ‘please will you give him my love.’

  Maria was relieved to hear these words and hoped that Nikos might hear them too. She wanted him to share her sense of why these visits mattered more than ever.

  Chapter Twelve

  WINDS FROM THE north and the east blew in over the next few weeks, bringing snow that coated the mountains of Crete. It would be several months until there was enough warmth to melt it.

  The night before her visit to Andreas in February, Maria had been up with Sofia, who was suffering night terrors. Her broken sleep meant that she overslept by just fifteen minutes, but it was enough to make her miss the first bus, and by the time she eventually reached the prison, the queue in front of her was long. It was raining heavily, and the downpour turned to sleet as she waited. In her haste she had forgotten to pick up her umbrella when she left the house, so by the time she went through the main door, she was soaked. The process of registration seemed to take longer than usual, and when she reached the visitors room, her hands and lips were numb with cold.

  It was a short visit that day, and this time it was she who tried to put on a brave face for Andreas.

  He looked pleased to see her, but there was not much to talk about this time. He asked how Sofia was enjoying school, and Maria gave the briefest answers. She was so distracted by her discomfort that she almost forgot to pass on the message that she had been given by Alexandros. It was only as she was leaving that she remembered it.

  ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘sends you his love.’

  The bell was ringing but she barely heard it. All she was aware of was Andreas’s smile.

  Between the bus station and home, Maria endured another soaking. As she trudged up the hill, rainwater was cascading down the steep streets, and by the time she arrived at her front door, her shoes were squelching. She was shivering so violently now that it felt as if her bones were rattling inside her body.

  Nikos came in with Sofia soon after and found his wife in bed, delirious, her teeth chattering. Her saturated clothes lay scattered across the bed.

  Memories of seeing her like this once before came flooding back. It was when she had first taken the drugs for leprosy. Like many other patients, she had gone through several days of extreme fever before turning a corner to recovery. Some had not survived at all, their bodies lacking the strength to fight back.

  When Nikos Kyritsis looked after strangers in the hospital, it was easy for him to be dispassionate, and he had a reputation for a calmness of manner that many doctors envied. With his own beloved wife, it was very different, and he struggled to contain his anxiety. His memories of those days on Spinalonga were vivid.

  For several days Maria’s temperature remained dangerously high and she drifted from fitful sleep to delirium and back. Nikos diagnosed pneumonia, and during several long nights he held his wife’s limp hand, agonised by the p
ossibility that she might not survive.

  Little Sofia was sent to stay with Fotini. In Plaka she could also spend a few nights with her Mousátos Pappoús. Even as a highly trained doctor, Nikos could not say how long it would take for Maria to recover.

  He took time off from work to care for her, sitting all day at her bedside to mop her brow and monitor her temperature. Twice a day he changed her sheets. Neighbours brought in food for him and a thin egg and lemon soup for Maria, a traditional recipe for recovery. She could not even lift her head to taste it, and could only sip the occasional mouthful of water.

  All those weeks as she lay in bed, she was aware of very little except the presence of the man who watched over her. When he was in the room, she felt safe. He sometimes sat and read to her, and the sound of his voice soothed her. It was usually poetry, and the way he read, whether it was Cavafy or Elytis, the lines sounded more like music than the spoken word.

  The worst phase of her sickness lasted for three weeks, but in late March she was strong enough to sit up, her head propped against several pillows. She was missing Sofia now, but knew that it was better for her daughter to be in Plaka.

  In early April, the little girl came home. She bounced into her parents’ bedroom and threw herself into Maria’s arms, scattering the small posy of flowers she held all over the bed.

  ‘Mamá! I have missed you so much!’

  She sat and chattered for hours, telling her mother everything she had been doing with her friend Mattheos. Sofia seemed to have grown up a lot in those weeks. She had learned to write her name and had produced enough drawings to fill an art gallery. One by one she displayed them to her mother, with great pride.

  Soon Maria was out of bed for a few hours a day. Nikos returned to work in the hospital and gradually life resumed some kind of normality.

  Easter fell on the second weekend of April that year, and the most important festival in the Orthodox calendar was celebrated all over Greece, as lavishly in Piraeus as in Agios Nikolaos.