One Summer in Crete

by Nadia Marks

  ‘How can I forget?’ her daughter replied with a chuckle. ‘She had a wild spirit, that girl.’ Froso, who was significantly older than both Eleni and their brother Androulios, was still living with her parents in the family home. Despite offers of marriage she had always been reluctant to enter into matrimony, preferring to stay at home with her father and mother and help bring up her siblings. Now she was considered past marriageable age.

  Eleni and Keith married in the village directly after the Easter celebrations, thus continuing the feasts and festivities for a few more days. The trestle tables and chairs which had been laid out in the square for Easter remained in place to accommodate the marriage celebrations. The spring lambs that had been cooking on the spits for Easter were replaced with new ones several times over for the duration. Eleni was a young woman very much loved by her community, and the Mavrantoni family was well respected, so this wedding was not going to be celebrated only by friends and relatives but by the entire village, young and old. It wasn’t every day that one of their own was marrying an Englishman, soon to be whisked away from them. The celebrations continued for three days and the music and singing echoed around the hills and mountains while the dancing put Keith’s stamina to the test. Knowing of the Cretan custom for traditional dancing at weddings he tried his best to learn a couple of them and practised diligently, but there was no competing with the local men who were born and raised on the moves.

  Since Keith’s new university post allowed him a month for the vacation, which as luck had it overlapped with the Orthodox Easter, he stayed with Eleni’s family after the wedding. On his return to London he immediately set about making arrangements for her to join him. He rented a little apartment near Mornington Crescent close to central London, booked a date at the register office for them to marry according to British law and then returned to Crete to collect his new bride.

  Life in London was as exciting as Eleni hoped it would be, and Keith was as loving and supportive as she knew he would be. His job provided well for both of them, although Eleni was not content to stay at home. She was used to working and enjoyed it. She applied for a job at the Greek embassy and was taken on as a part-time receptionist. Her fluency in Greek was an asset and she soon made enough contacts to start giving private tuition to the children of compatriots living in the capital who wanted them to grow up speaking their language. This would keep her in work for many years to come – her calling as a teacher was ever useful. As her sister Froso had said, Eleni had a mind of her own; she was an enterprising young woman and managed to settle successfully into the life of the metropolis.

  ‘It’s a long way from my village,’ she told Keith one Sunday afternoon as they walked arm in arm in the park. ‘It’s hard to believe this is my home now! Thank you for bringing me here!’

  ‘I was afraid that you would miss the sea and the open spaces, and your family,’ Keith said, concerned for her.

  ‘So long as you are here with me, I’m happy,’ she replied, leaning closer to him.

  ‘I’ll always be here.’ He kissed the top of her head.

  ‘When I was little, I used to have these recurring dreams,’ she told him, her arm linked in his. ‘I was living in a busy place full of noise and buildings and cars, people I didn’t know all around me, yet I wasn’t scared at all.’ Eleni looked up at Keith and smiled. ‘I didn’t feel afraid because there was always someone with me . . . I didn’t know who, but I felt secure. I used to think that maybe it was my grandmother watching over me . . .’ she tightened her hold on his arm and looked up at him again. ‘I felt safe, like I feel now with you!’

  ‘You obviously had a premonition you were going to meet me,’ he smiled and bent down to kiss her.

  ‘I know! I did . . . it’s not a joke!’ she replied. ‘My mother always said I had some kind of gift of prediction . . . just like when I first met you. I had a feeling you would come into the shop, and then when I saw you, I knew you!’

  It was through this gift of foretelling the future that Eleni believed she had known the very moment she had conceived. They had discussed having a family at some point and had agreed to wait a year or two, but not long after arriving in London she fell pregnant. Calli was born on the twenty-seventh of January 1982, which Keith discovered to his delight was the same date as the birth of his great hero Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – and of course he couldn’t help but announce it to all the nurses and to anyone else who’d listen. ‘What an act to follow!’ the midwife told him, laughing, as she placed baby Calli in Eleni’s arms.

  Being in London in the depths of winter with a newborn, away from her family and friends, was hard for Eleni. But both she and Keith embraced parenthood wholeheartedly and counted themselves lucky. Thinking back to those days was another reason why, now, Calli’s rejection by James hit them both so hard. Neither of them could understand his motives and they struggled to see how he could turn his back on their daughter at such a time.

  ‘When we had our babies there were just the two of us – no one to help – but we managed,’ Eleni would lament privately to Keith lest she upset Calli by raising the subject again.

  ‘Yes, but we had love in our hearts, Eleni,’ Keith said, shaking his head. ‘Unfortunately it seems that our daughter chose the wrong man for a life partner. End of story! We should all try to forget about him!’

  Nonetheless it wasn’t easy for Calli to forget ten years of her life without regrets. But the baby she was carrying made up for all the heartache she was feeling and gave her strength to continue and look towards a new future. Her work kept her busy too; support from her family and friends did much to help her heal emotionally, and to her surprise she appeared to have more energy than ever.

  ‘It’s your hormones,’ her mother told her, ‘if they don’t make you feel nauseous, they sometimes give you a boost and you can feel even better than before.’

  ‘I couldn’t get out of bed from throwing up,’ her friend Sarah told her when she came to visit, ‘and look at you, all glowing skin and shiny hair . . . I hate you!’ she laughed. Calli’s due date was early November; a baby girl, she had learned after her last scan. She had had doubts about finding out the sex but eventually decided that the knowledge confirmed the baby’s presence and made the event all the more real and exciting.

  ‘Ah! Look, Mum!’ she said, pointing at the screen. ‘A little Eleni!’

  Following the Greek custom, Calli had announced that if the baby was a girl she would be named after her beloved mother. ‘Just as you named me after Yiayia,’ she said. Mother and daughter had gone to the hospital together for the scan and when the doctor told them she was carrying a baby girl they both burst into tears.

  ‘She’s going to be another little Cretan thunderbolt,’ Calli said, squeezing Eleni’s hand.

  4

  Eleni was pushing the overflowing supermarket trolley down the tea and coffee aisle when she heard her mobile phone ring in her handbag.

  ‘I must remember to stop dumping my bag in there,’ she muttered under her breath, diving among the groceries to retrieve it buried under a heap of shopping. Now that she had the whole family to feed again, her trolley was always more loaded than when she shopped for herself and Keith.

  When eventually she found the phone it had switched to voicemail. It was Keith. He must want me to buy something, she thought, waiting to hear the message.

  ‘Don’t worry, love, everything’s fine,’ she heard her husband’s anxious voice reverberate in her ear. ‘Don’t panic, keep calm,’ his voice continued, ‘but Calli’s been in an accident. Can you come home please . . . straight away!’ Without a second thought and of course in a panic, Eleni abandoned the trolley in the middle of the aisle and ran out of the supermarket to her car.

  ‘She wasn’t the one driving,’ Keith began, anxiously trying to explain what had happened as they set off for the hospital. ‘John, you know, her assistant . . . he called me from the hospital just before I phoned you . . . He told me that he had been d
riving . . .’ Keith’s speech faltered in his attempt to keep calm. ‘He apparently had to swerve to avoid hitting a cyclist who came out of nowhere, and ended up having a head-on collision with a car coming the other way. But . . .’ he paused to take a deep breath before continuing, ‘but luckily they were both driving slowly, so it really wasn’t as bad as it might have been.’

  ‘Never mind all that!’ Eleni interrupted, cutting him short, her impatience getting the better of her. ‘Do we know how badly she’s hurt?’ she said, her heart thumping in her ears as she turned to look at him through tear-blurred eyes. Keith’s face was as pale as her own. ‘And the baby?’ she asked, again holding her breath and dreading the answer.

  ‘I don’t know, love. I feel so stupid for not asking, but when I got the call from the hospital, I was so shocked I just couldn’t think straight . . . all I heard . . . all that mattered at that moment was that Calli was all right.’

  When they at last located Calli’s bed, they found her fast asleep, sporting a nasty bruise on her right shoulder and arm, and one on her forehead; she looked pale and drawn but otherwise less badly injured than they had feared.

  ‘We gave her a sedative to calm her,’ the nurse told them. ‘Don’t worry, she’s fine now. The doctor will be along soon to speak to you.’

  Eleni looked at her daughter and tried to fight back her tears. She reached for Calli’s hand and sat by her side. Gently she brushed her hair off her forehead and bend down to kiss it. She had woken that morning with one of her strange premonitions, but Calli was in such a buoyant mood that she had tried not to dwell on it. A few hours ago the two of them were having coffee in the kitchen, waiting for John to come and drive Calli to the photo shoot.

  ‘She was so cheerful this morning.’ She turned to Keith, who appeared as miserable as she felt. ‘Poor baby, look at her now.’

  ‘She was lucky to have escaped with minor injuries, no broken bones,’ the doctor told them when he finally arrived, ‘and she was quite conscious when she was brought in.’ He picked up the clipboard from the front of the bed. ‘She will be fine,’ he paused while reading her notes, ‘but unfortunately,’ he continued, looking up at them both, ‘we couldn’t save the baby.’ Eleni felt her knees buckle beneath her and put an arm on the bed to steady herself. The impact of the collision, he informed them, had been enough of a shock to cause the placenta to become detached, thus causing a severe haemorrhage which sent Calli into premature labour; the baby was stillborn. Eleni looked from the doctor to Keith, unable to speak, the colour drained from her face. All she could think of was how matter-of-factly the young doctor had delivered those devastating words.

  She was already five months pregnant and the baby had been due in November. Calli was inconsolable. The ordeal of what happened to her physically and emotionally left her bereft and traumatized. The shock and loss of her relationship had now faded into unimportance in comparison with the loss of her baby. The grief she was plunged into had no measure and its intensity overwhelmed her. She reached the depths of despair on the date baby Eleni was due. Her mother worried for her safety; she had never seen her daughter so broken.

  ‘You have been through a lot,’ her friend Josie told her. ‘I think it would be good to talk to someone other than just us . . . someone who knows how to help.’

  ‘Maybe if she accepted some work,’ Eleni said to Keith, at a loss as to what else to suggest. ‘It might do her good, take her mind off things . . . You know how she loves her job.’

  ‘She will go back to work when she is ready. She needs time, what she needs now is help,’ Keith replied.

  Her world was dark, it took several months of therapy and the best part of a year with all her family and dear friends rallying around her before Calli started to find herself again. By then, spring was well on its way. The long sad nights were at last behind them and the smell of freshly cut grass scented the air. Calli took a deep breath, literally and metaphorically, and with her exhalation she blew away some of the sadness she had held inside herself for so many months. It was time now to pick herself up and rejoin the world.

  The next time her phone rang with a work assignment, instead of declining the call she accepted the offer with pleasure, with a certain relief at the prospect of employing her mind again. During the next few weeks she eased herself into work with a few small commissions, and then started to look for an apartment. It was time to leave the refuge of the family home and launch herself into an independent life, as she had promised herself she would do. James was out of her thoughts now for good and it was time to move on.

  ‘He’s got a bloody nerve!’ Josie had said when Calli told her that after she lost the baby he had tried to see her. ‘I hope you told him where to go!’

  ‘Don’t you worry, my friend,’ she replied. ‘It was fine, James is history, I can handle it.’

  She was now well on her way to recovery and once again ready to embrace life with something approaching her usual zest. Calli knew that the loss of her baby was a sorrow she would always carry with her, but she refused to give up. There was a world out there waiting for her. She was finally ready to embrace life again and as it turned out this came in the form of an assignment, a job proposal from her Sunday paper.

  ‘There’s an island in Greece called Ikaria,’ David, her commissioning editor, had said when he telephoned, ‘and I’d like you to go there and do a story for us.’

  ‘Sounds great! What’s the story and where is it?’ Calli asked.

  ‘Somewhere . . . let me think . . . in the Aegean . . .’ he replied, distracted by interruptions competing for his attention in the office; Calli could hear someone in the background trying to talk to him.

  ‘What exactly do you want me to do, David?’ she asked, trying to focus his attention on their phone call.

  ‘Well . . . apparently people are living for an awfully long time on this island,’ he struggled to explain, ‘but no one really knows why . . . It’s a bit of a phenomenon.’

  ‘Is that so different from other Greek islands?’ she persevered, hoping for more information. ‘Don’t most people live to a ripe old age in Greece?’

  ‘Well, maybe, but they say this is different . . . something to do with the environment that makes them live even longer . . . Look, just come into the office tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything,’ he finally said, exasperated. ‘It’s crazy busy in here and I can’t hear myself think.’

  As soon as Calli was off the phone, she looked up Ikaria online.

  ‘I’ve been given a commission to go to Greece to follow up a story,’ she told her parents over dinner that night.

  ‘Where in Greece?’ her mother asked, leaning forward to hear more.

  ‘The island of Ikaria – do you know it?’ Calli looked at them both.

  ‘Isn’t that the island where everyone lives for ever?’ mused Keith.

  ‘Kind of . . .’ Calli said, wondering why she hadn’t heard about it before now. ‘How did I miss this?’

  ‘Perhaps because you’ve been a bit busy lately?’ Eleni replied.

  ‘I heard a programme on the radio about it the other day,’ Keith told them. ‘It sounds a fascinating place.’

  ‘To say the least!’ Calli reached for a chunk of bread to soak up the olive oil and lemon dressing from her plate. ‘They’ve named it the island where people forget to die! Did you know that there are only four other places in the world that have the same record of longevity?’

  ‘Do they know why?’ Eleni asked.

  ‘Well, it must be something to do with the healthy lifestyle, but apparently from what I’ve been reading there’s more to it than that . . .’

  ‘Well . . . there’s all the mythology too,’ Keith added, ‘hence the island’s name – you know, the story of Icarus flying too close to the sun and falling into the sea and all that?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Calli said. ‘Not that that can have anything to do with people living a long time – but it does add to the mystery, don’t you ag
ree?’

  ‘When do they want you to go?’ Eleni reached for the bottle of wine and filled their glasses.

  ‘Soon, I think. I’m going into the office for the briefing tomorrow.’

  ‘Will you still take the flat?’ her mother asked. Calli had at last found an apartment that she quite liked and was considering putting down a deposit. Over the last few weeks she had viewed several possibilities, but nothing that she thought suitable until now. No point moving somewhere you don’t like for the sake of it, her parents encouraged her. Stay until you find the right place.

  ‘I probably won’t, Mum,’ she replied, ‘It wasn’t that brilliant. If you don’t mind, I’d rather leave my things here while I’m away?’

  ‘Of course we don’t mind!’ Eleni said, relieved that her daughter was not about to move out yet. ‘You can start looking again when you return.’

  ‘You know . . .’ she looked at her parents, ‘I was thinking I might stay on a little longer after I finish the job, take a break . . . have a holiday . . . spend the summer in the sun. I mean, I don’t really have to rush back, do I?’

  ‘Ikaria is part of the north Aegean islands,’ David informed her the next day when she went into the office for her briefing, ‘and it has been declared one of the five “Blue Zones” in the world. The other four,’ he continued, more informed and much calmer this time than the day before on the phone, ‘are Nicoya in Costa Rica, Okinawa in Japan, Loma Linda in California, and Sardinia in Italy.’

  Calli of course already knew that – she had done her homework – but she still wanted to hear what David had to say. ‘Research shows that the environment in these five areas is conducive to old age.’ He continued with his explanation.

  ‘Do you think it’s due to the easy pace of life and to eating habits?’ she asked, musing that as far as she knew most of rural Greece was conducive to old age.

  ‘Well . . . not only . . . Food and lifestyle obviously are both factors, but more causes than that seem to be involved.’ He reached for his laptop and turned it round so that Calli could see his screen showing images of the island.