One August Night

by Victoria Hislop

  Some of the tenants had got up early to wish the couple farewell. Manolis was among them. He was waiting in the hallway and had his car parked outside. He had told them that he would take them to the ship. He had already stowed his bag in the car. His own possessions fitted into the same holdall that he had brought with him from Crete all those years before.

  It was a ten-minute journey to the port, and when they got there, he opened the door for Kyría Agathi and then took their two suitcases and set them down on the ground. Finally, he took out his own bag.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ queried Agathi, seeing the holdall at his feet. ‘You have another week in the pension before you have to move out.’

  ‘Just getting myself organised,’ said Manolis, hugging her.

  It was then that she saw the twinkle in his eye and understood. This was a man she knew and loved so well.

  She threw her arms around him with a scream.

  ‘Manolis!’

  She wept profusely. There were others nearby saying goodbye to their loved ones for the very last time, and they imagined that she too was leaving someone she cherished.

  ‘Manolis! Manolis! I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,’ she cried in joy and disbelief.

  Stavros shook his head, smiling.

  The foghorn was blasting out. It was a sign that they only had fifteen minutes left on Greek soil before the ship sailed.

  Manolis saw his friend Tasos approaching and extricated himself from Agathi’s embrace.

  ‘M-m-Manolis!’ Tasos said breathlessly. ‘S-s-sorry I kept you waiting! The b-b-bus was late.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Manolis. ‘You won’t be needing to use the bus any more.’ As he said this, he handed his friend his car key.

  Tasos took it, bemused.

  ‘B-b-but . . .’

  ‘It’s yours, fíle mou. Enjoy it.’

  Tasos was literally speechless. Manolis had not told him why he had to come, and he had never in his life received such a gift. A bright green Alfa Romeo. Gleaming and polished. Every man’s dream.

  ‘Look, we have to go,’ Manolis said. ‘I’ll drop you a line when we arrive. Take care . . . She goes at quite a speed!’

  He turned away. Agathi and Stavros were waiting for him, still on shore. The three of them were the last passengers to board, and there were formalities to be gone through with tickets and visas. Above them they could see the passenger decks, full of people waving handkerchiefs and calling out to family and friends below.

  Manolis looked up at the boat. He had been working on ships for so long, but it had been years since he had actually travelled anywhere on one. It felt very strange, and his palms were sweating as he picked up his bag and began to walk up the gangplank. It was a bridge that would lead him from one life to another.

  The great hawsers that held the ship in place were being loosened, the anchor was being hoisted up, and the slow process of moving out of the port began.

  The trio soon found their cabins, stored the luggage they had with them for the journey and then went up on deck. They found a space big enough for the three of them by the rails.

  Agathi had insisted that Elli and Philippos did not come, so there was nobody for them to wave to. Once the ship had swung round, they had a good view of the city of Piraeus from their position on the aft deck. They all gazed at it, knowing they were seeing it for the last time.

  Agathi was dabbing at her eyes. She saw very little through the mist of her tears. Stavros had a comforting arm around her.

  As the ship moved slowly and steadily south, Manolis could not take his eyes away from the view. The city became smaller and smaller, a speck in the landmass. And then everything solid – mainland, islands, homeland – gradually vanished from view. There was nothing to interrupt the flat line of the horizon.

  For a while he experienced the full force of nostalgia, a sensation so deep and powerful it almost made him swoon. Most people, including Agathi and Stavros, had gone inside now as the wind began to strengthen. Manolis stood there alone for a full hour, his hands gripping the rails. The middle of the ocean was a lonely place.

  He recalled the last time he had stared down into the waves. It was the day after Anna’s death, when his grief was still fresh and his memories of her touch were still warm. Her earring had been in his trouser pocket that day. He still had it all these years later, and felt for it inside his jacket now.

  It glinted in the palm of his hand and he looked at it one last time, imagined it hanging from the lobe of her ear, imagined her smile. And then he let it drop. It was a long way down, and the stones were the colour of the sea. He did not even see it touch the water. Finally he was leaving Anna behind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  IN AGIOS NIKOLAOS, Sofia was soon to experience true grief for the first time. Mousátos Pappoús had been living with them for over a year, after failing to recover properly from a chest infection, and in the autumn of 1969, he died peacefully in his bed.

  When Alexandros Vandoulakis had passed away, Sofia had been too young to understand the full force of such a loss, but this time she was inconsolable, and Maria found her daughter’s sadness almost harder to deal with than her own. It was weeks before Sofia stopped crying herself to sleep. The event seemed to mark the moment when she lost the sparkle and innocence of childhood and her adolescence began.

  During the entire time that she was nursing her father at home, Maria had not visited the prison. She did not want to bring home any infections.

  Once the funeral and the forty-day period of mourning had passed, she made it a priority to go and see Andreas. She had often thought of him during the intervening time, but had not even had time to write him a letter. She felt she had been neglectful.

  ‘It’s not enough just to think of someone,’ she said to Nikos, who was hoping that she might not resume these visits. ‘You have to show them that you think of them.’

  Andreas was lying on his bed when she walked into the room, and did not stir. Was he asleep? Was he ill?

  ‘Andreas? It’s Maria . . .’

  She could see that his eyes were open.

  ‘Maria? Ah, Maria,’ came a faint voice from the emaciated figure on the bed. He struggled to sit up, just about managing to lean his back against the wall behind him.

  Maria found him greatly changed. The image that she had in her mind of him, religiously transformed, smiling, was not the reality now. Inside his prison uniform, he was just bones, and he had aged by a decade.

  He seemed very preoccupied and did not ask her a single question, even about Sofia. The only thing that interested him was his own spiritual state.

  Maria had to lean in to hear him, his voice was so weak.

  ‘I have been fasting,’ he said. ‘It brings me closer to the Lord.’

  ‘I sometimes do that for a few days too,’ Maria answered. In Holy Week she had often tried to be observant when she could, though she found she could not sustain it for five whole days, particularly when she was working in the hospital. It was impractical to feel weak with hunger when she had patients to take care of.

  ‘Not just for a few days, Maria. I do this for months at a time. It began last year. You know our Lord was in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights without food.’

  ‘Yes, Andreas. That’s why we have Lent, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, nothing passed my lips for forty days. I came so close to him, Maria. He was with me, next to me, within me.’

  Maria was torn between the notion of faith and her knowledge of the human body. She did not want to be cynical, but she found herself imagining the state of delirium that such deprivation would induce.

  ‘Do you know the Lord, Maria? Has he visited you? Has he sat beside you? Have you felt that warmth? That light?’ As he spoke, he gesticulated wildly. His hands looked unnaturally large at the end of his emaciated arms.

  His direct questioning left Maria feeling slightly uncomfortable. He challenged her own very privat
e ideas of faith and spirituality.

  Yes, she had known God’s peace. Yes, she had understood the strength that faith brought. For all those years on Spinalonga, she had seen the fortitude and the hope expressed by so many patients, and the desire for healing that had been dashed for them. She had nursed dozens through the moment of death and seen them sustained by the belief that this was not an end, but a beginning. The presence of God next to them was unquestioned, even as they left this life, some of them in terrible pain.

  She nodded to avoid giving Andreas an answer, and he continued.

  ‘After those forty days, I had no wish to eat. I wanted to remain with the Lord. I saw him surrounded by light, surrounded by angels. I was given a glimpse of heaven, Maria.’

  Maria listened. There was nothing else demanded of her. This fanaticism seemed to need no response.

  ‘I am getting closer to him all the time now. I eat a small amount of bread and take a little water each day. But that’s all.’

  Maria looked at him. It was obvious that he was ill – even dying. Any words she wanted to say simply dried in her mouth. There in front of her was a man slowly killing himself.

  His tone changed suddenly, as if he had some new source of energy.

  ‘I am moving towards him, Maria. What I mean is that I am moving towards being with him for eternity. He is calling me, Maria. I know he is calling me!’

  There was a maniacal excitement in Andreas’s voice that suddenly made Maria feel afraid. She was locked in with him and there was no way out until the guard came.

  ‘But there is something between us! There is something in the way! There is something between me and God, Maria! I feel his crown of thorns as though it is on my own head! I feel the nails in my hands! And in my feet! But there is something between us . . .’

  Maria watched him warily. Hallucinations were a frequent result of food deprivation. He was getting more and more agitated by the moment. It was a small comfort to her that she would easily be able to defend herself if he attacked her. He must be half her weight now and looked as if he could be snapped in half.

  ‘I know what it is that keeps me from him!’ he cried out. ‘There is a truth that has to be told, Maria. There is a truth that I must tell!’

  ‘A truth?’ she asked calmly. ‘Can you tell it to me?’

  ‘No!’ he said, with a hint of anger. ‘There is only one person who must have this truth. There is someone it belongs to. It is his truth, Maria. He must have it. He . . . must . . . have . . . it!’

  He was almost raving now. Maria glanced nervously at the door, willing it to open.

  ‘I need to write to him, Maria. I need paper. Give me paper. Do you have paper, Maria? Quickly, I must have paper.’

  Maria’s pulse was racing. She grabbed her bag from the floor and rummaged in it frantically. She knew she did not have a sheet of paper. It was not something she carried with her. As she pulled out a pencil from the depths of its darkness, she could see Andreas getting frustrated.

  ‘Not just a pencil! Paper! I need paper! Paper, Maria! Paper!’

  Maria was almost in tears. She was panicking. In a side pocket she felt something and heard a crinkling sound. She almost cried with relief as she pulled it out. It was a shopping list scribbled on a sheet of exercise paper, and the back of it was blank.

  Andreas almost snatched it out of her hand. He grabbed the Bible, which lay on the bed next to him, and used it to rest the paper on.

  Maria handed him the pencil and he began to scribble furiously. It was as if he was possessed. She could not see what he was writing, but he filled the entire side of the sheet, signed his name and folded it twice before holding it out to her.

  ‘Please,’ he said, as if addressing his secretary. ‘Please can you see that this is delivered to Manolis Vandoulakis.’

  ‘But I . . .’ She wanted to tell him that she did not know exactly where Manolis was, but Andreas was not listening.

  ‘It is confidential. Totally confidential. Only Manolis should read this. No one else!’

  He was brusque to the point of rudeness, but nothing surprised Maria on this visit. All she wanted was to get out of there.

  ‘Do you promise me?’

  Suddenly the guard’s footsteps could be heard outside.

  ‘Maria? Do you promise? No one else!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and deftly took the letter from Andreas’s hand.

  As the door swung open, she was zipping up her bag.

  She had never been so relieved to leave the prison. She wanted to get away as fast as she could, and almost fell as she ran along the road away from its heavy door and forbidding walls.

  Andreas’s state of religious mania had shocked her. She had never encountered anything like it before. She had read of monks who lived alone and meditated all day, of those who crawled for many kilometres on hands and knees to reach a holy place, of those who sought solitude on mountaintops. But they were still connected to the earth, to life. Andreas seemed distant from both.

  When she got home, Nikos was sitting at the kitchen table with Sofia. They were tackling her maths together.

  The prison visits were never mentioned in front of Sofia. Nikos took one look at Maria’s face and could see that something was wrong. He followed her to the bedroom, where she was hanging up her coat.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked with concern.

  ‘He’s gone mad,’ she answered simply. ‘And he’s dying.’

  She slumped down on the end of their bed. The visit had exhausted her.

  ‘I don’t really know what else to tell you,’ she added. ‘He was crazed.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Maria,’ said Nikos, kissing the top of his wife’s head. ‘You look really upset.’

  ‘I’ll be fine in a minute,’ Maria reassured him. ‘You’d better get back to the maths!’

  She closed her eyes and sat for a while.

  What was she going to do? It was the greatest dilemma she had ever faced and one she had to confront alone. She glanced at the brown shoulder bag sitting next to her on the bed. Nikos had given it to her for a birthday half a decade ago and she had used it every day since. Over the years, the leather had softened in a pleasing way and its worn straps had been repaired many times over. It had been a constant companion wherever she went. But now it seemed like an unexploded bomb.

  Manolis Vandoulakis. It had shocked her to hear Andreas saying that name.

  Inside her bag was a letter. There was no barrier to her reading it, no envelope securely sealed down that she would have to steam open or tear apart. Just two folds. One, two and she would know what it said.

  It was not addressed to her. But she knew that the contents were of concern to her. Did that give her a right to read it? She wrestled with the question.

  Downstairs she could hear Nikos with Sofia.

  ‘Bravo, agápi mou! Bravo!’ he said.

  Sofia struggled with her maths, and Nikos spent hours each day patiently helping her to understand it. The cheerful sound of her daughter’s hands clapping together with pleasure came up through the floor. There had been a breakthrough.

  Maria felt inside the bag. The letter was still there.

  She took it out. Before she had a chance to yield to the temptation, she should find an envelope, put the letter inside and seal it up. This was her obligation. Not because she owed anything to Andreas Vandoulakis, but because it was her moral duty. She had been entrusted to act as postman. And by a dying man.

  She ran downstairs with the letter in her hand. In the living room, she rummaged through her small desk, which sat in the corner of the room. She felt a sense of panic. There was plenty of writing paper, but she had run out of envelopes.

  ‘Nikos,’ she said, hurrying into the kitchen, ‘I need an envelope!’

  ‘Mamá, please,’ complained Sofia. ‘Can Babá just finish this for me first?’

  ‘I’m sure I have one, agápi mou, but just give me a second.’

  Neither of them f
elt that an envelope could be a greater matter of urgency than the algebraic equation they were in the middle of solving.

  Maria retreated into the living room. She was sweating so much that the folded paper was almost sticking to her hand. It felt like it was burning through her palm.

  A moment or so passed. She felt nauseous as a war continued to rage within her. Just to peel up a corner of the sheet – would that be wrong? Was she not entitled to learn some kind of truth from the man who had killed her sister? Did he have a right to keep anything from her? What exactly had he written to Manolis?

  From the other room, she could hear that father and daughter were still immersed. If only Nikos would come in at that instant to hand her an envelope, this moment would pass. She felt the panic rising within her.

  With a shaking hand, she opened out the sheet and ran her eyes over the list: flour, eggs, sugar, coffee, cheese, soap . . . It would be so easy to turn it over. She even held it up to the light so that she could see the faint scrawl coming through from the other side. It looked even untidier than her husband’s.

  The rumours about Manolis and her sister had preoccupied Maria when she was on Spinalonga, but she had always told herself that Andreas must be Sofia’s father, because she had never wanted to believe otherwise. She was convinced that on the reverse side of her banal list of household goods was an important truth, and a battle raged within her.

  What held her back, but only just, was a promise. She had promised that the letter would be given to a particular person and that nobody else would read it. There was no possibility of breaking such a vow, and she found her resolve hardening.

  She folded the letter up again and concealed it in her desk drawer.

  It must leave her possession as soon as possible. It must find its way to Manolis.

  She had a further rummage for an envelope and eventually found a heavy brown one at the back of a drawer. She stuffed Andreas’s letter inside, sealed it up and put an additional strip of tape over the flap. The outside was left blank. She said nothing to Nikos and put the envelope in her bag, knowing that he never looked inside.