Island of Secrets

by Patricia Wilson

  Poppy had always recognised her mother’s beauty, and now she wanted to be exactly like her. Maria taught her to cook and crochet. After siesta, Poppy would take a chair into the street with her mother and the other women, while the men played cards or tavli and drank raki in the kafenion. She soon learned the hook and made Maria a set of gold antimacassars.

  The women’s talk, while they worked on their linen, fascinated Poppy. Respectable members of the community gossiped and joked together, mostly about sex. They laughed at Poppy’s blushes and said she’d come to understand.

  Later that month, Poppy’s father and Stavro met the village elders to discuss her future. In isolated villages, marriages were considered carefully for their bloodline. Four local boys were selected but Poppy had already set her heart on one: Yeorgo. Her childhood affection had developed into something more, now that her hormones were sitting up and paying attention. Yeorgo was Matthia’s best friend and, although his two younger brothers, Emmanouil and Thanassi, were on the list too, Poppy hadn’t hesitated.

  ‘Who will you marry, my girl?’ her father said, eyes twinkling, guessing the answer.

  Yeorgo, handsome and witty, was a miracle baby. Like Poppy’s brothers, Stavro and Matthia, Yeorgo had survived the events of the occupation in 1943. Also, he played the lira, a skill admired by everyone.

  Poppy relayed her wishes but feared Yeorgo might not love her.

  ‘I want to marry your brother and have his babies,’ she told her best friend, Yeorgo’s sister.

  ‘Emmanouil will be disappointed then,’ Agapi said.

  Poppy didn’t care for Yeorgo’s brothers, both born after the war. Thanassi, the youngest, was sweet on another girl, but Emmanouil, two years younger than Yeorgo, was a constant bully. Poppy knew Emmanouil wanted her. He had made surreptitious grabs at her breasts or bottom and she had slapped him several times. Once, he caught her wrist, twisted her arm up her back and rubbed his body against her in a lewd fashion, telling her one day he would do her and she would love it. Afraid of trouble, Poppy was ashamed, believing the incident was somehow her fault.

  Maria and Vassili took Poppy to Yeorgo’s house where her future mother-in-law, Constantina, waited. When they arrived, Emmanouil stormed out of the cottage, knocking her shoulder as he passed. On that day, thirteen-year-old Poppy became formally betrothed to Yeorgo who was already a man in her eyes.

  ‘Poppy, let me hug you,’ Constantina said, welcoming her into the Lambrakis home.

  *

  Over the next three years, Poppy’s love for Yeorgo grew even stronger. Eagerly, she waited for the time they would marry. The marriage was set for her sixteenth birthday and Mama soon started work on her wedding dress.

  When Emmanouil was betrothed to Yánna, a friend of Poppy’s, Poppy believed he would finally leave her alone. However, the closer it got to Poppy and Yeorgo’s big day, the more Emmanouil pestered her, until one terrifying night, a week before her marriage.

  The street had been empty when Poppy returned home from Constantina’s. A streetlight was out, making the narrow road dark and oddly disorientating. She hurried, startled when Emmanouil leapt out of an abandoned house. He grabbed her arms and herded her through the doorway.

  ‘Why didn’t you choose me?’ he snarled, shoving her against a rough stone wall.

  ‘Get off me, you pig! You’re drunk!’ Poppy shouted, pushing him away.

  Emmanouil slapped her hard across the face. ‘That’s for all the times you’ve whacked me, you slut,’ he said.

  Poppy tasted blood, realising he’d split her lip. For all his aggravation, he had never before used violence. Suddenly afraid, she tried to sidestep around him.

  He crushed her against the wall, grabbed her wrist and forced her hand against the front of his trousers. ‘Rub me,’ he snarled, before he covered her mouth with his, slobbering, his breath sour and stinking of whisky.

  She turned her face away, twisted and writhed. ‘Let me go or I’ll scream to the entire village.’

  In truth, Poppy was afraid someone would hear them and blame her. Her reputation and the good name of her family would be soiled. Emmanouil grabbed her hair and forced her head down while his other hand fumbled with his trouser buttons. She thrashed, gouged blindly with her nails and wouldn’t submit to his bullying even though her scalp seemed on fire.

  ‘Give it up,’ Emmanouil whispered. ‘I’m stronger than you so let’s not fight. Be grateful I’ll allow you to keep your precious virginity for my brother.’

  Poppy panicked, she was no match for his strength and he knew it. The struggle continued until he overpowered her.

  Emmanouil clasped one hand over her mouth while his other pushed between their bodies, tugging at the front of his trousers. All of a sudden his fleshy thing sprung out. He stepped back, gripped her hair with two hands and dragged her head down towards it.

  ‘Take it, suck it! Be nice to me and I’ll let you go. Nobody will know,’ he hissed.

  Almost upon it, Poppy felt its heat, the musty smell clouding her face, cloying in her nostrils. A scream rose in her throat but she forced herself to swallow the noise. She clenched her teeth and clamped her mouth shut. Tears raced down her cheeks. Although wanting to reason with him, she daren’t part her lips. His penis, hot and hard, prodded her face. Emmanouil yanked on her hair.

  ‘Let me in, Poppy!’ he hissed.

  Terrified and almost fainting, a sudden change came over her. Anger exploded in her head. Enraged, she made a fist and punched him with all her might between his legs.

  He squealed and his legs buckled.

  ‘I hate you!’ Poppy said. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’

  The instant he let go of her hair, he grabbed her breasts and squeezed so hard she cried in pain. She struggled against him, snatched the dagger from his belt and, using all her strength, she slammed it under his ribs. His mouth hit her head as he doubled over and fell to his knees.

  The knife clattered to the floor. Not thinking of the consequences, terrified and desperate to hurt him enough to get away, she swung her foot and kicked him in the face. Then she leapt over his body and ran out of the dark building without looking back.

  What have I done?!

  Trembling, and afraid someone would see her, Poppy washed his blood from her face and hands at the village spring.

  That night she cried herself to sleep, hating Emmanouil, terrified she had killed him. She would go to prison, her family shamed, ostracised. Yeorgo would never forgive her.

  *

  The following day, every hour seemed darker than the last to Poppy, an eternal nightmare, yet nobody spoke of Emmanouil.

  ‘You are very quiet tonight, little one,’ Yeorgo said the next evening. He had called her ‘little one’ since she was a child, and still did although she was fifteen.

  ‘I’m fine, Yeorgo, don’t worry.’ Her head was spinning from lack of food, lack of sleep, and fear. What should she do? Run away?

  Yeorgo remained sweet and romantic, but she made excuses to go home early.

  She hardly slept, living in fear of Emmanouil’s re-appearance, or the police coming to arrest her for murder. After her midday meal, she took her crocheting and sat on the shady side of the street, watching the dilapidated cottage. Her hands, greased in a nervous sweat, kept slipping off the hook. Her eyes were dry, and her vision so blurred from lack of sleep, she couldn’t focus on the loop of silk. Dropped stitches ran through her work faster than the beat of her racing heart. She imagined flesh-flies on Emmanouil’s bloodied face. Tiny white maggots expelled from the red-eyed fly burrowing quickly into the corpse. She decided to sneak out that night and bury him right there in the ruin, before he started to stink.

  When Poppy saw a group of children playing hide and seek, about to enter the crumbling old house, she leapt up, horrified. What if they discovered his flyblown body?

  ‘Go!’ she yelled, running at them. She gathered her courage and decided to look inside the building. She held her breat
h and stepped through the long grass in the doorway. A cat jumped from one of the worm-eaten beams. Startled, Poppy screamed.

  Weeds, growing through the floor, were flattened but, apart from that, she saw no sign of the fight. No blood – no knife – and most importantly, no body.

  At Constantina’s house that evening, she tried to find out what had happened to Yeorgo’s brother.

  ‘I haven’t seen Emmanouil for a few days, Kiriea Constantina, is he all right?’ she enquired casually, her heart thumping against her ribs.

  ‘Hurmph!’ Constantina said. ‘He’s supposed to be in Heraklion searching for work, or so he claims. But in truth, I believe my son’s gone to the hospital. You wouldn’t have believed the state of him. He could hardly stand when he came home, the night before last. He’d been fighting and for once, somebody got the better of him.’ She snorted. ‘He breaks my heart, that boy. Perhaps it will teach him a lesson . . . but I doubt it. If I know Emmanouil, he’ll be back soon, looking for revenge.’

  The rush of relief that she hadn’t killed him was powerful, but nothing compared with the idea that he would reappear on a vendetta: it terrified Poppy to her core.

  Chapter 26

  THE NEXT THREE DAYS dragged out. Poppy’s fear of Emmanouil’s return gathered momentum. Nobody knew him better than his mother and her words kept Poppy awake at night.

  If I know Emmanouil, he’ll be back soon, looking for revenge.

  She woke on the morning of her sixteenth birthday after having slept in her parents’ house for the last time.

  The village women came to the cottage at dawn and sang bridal songs, in accordance with tradition. They removed her nightclothes, stood her in the tin bath, and washed her hair and body with perfumed soaps. They anointed her private places with olive oil and a tincture of herbs to numb the tearing pain and make it easier for her husband to enter.

  Excited to be the centre of attention and wear such wonderful clothes, she marvelled that even her underwear was new, made by the village women. They also crafted gifts of linen and cooked food for the marriage banquet. The men had worked metal pots and utensils for her kitchen and tools for the garden.

  Once dressed, Poppy preened in front of the big old mirror. For her wedding dress, thousands of silk cocoons, unwound and spun, were woven into metres of fabric on the loom. Lace, crafted by Mama and her friends, trimmed the sleeves, neckline and hem. The gown, gloriously slinky and sophisticated, made Poppy’s eyes sparkle.

  Wedding crowns, garlands of lemon blossom and citrus leaves, were intertwined for Poppy and Yeorgo by the village elders. The two crowns joined by lengths of white ribbon.

  ‘My dress is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ Poppy said, twirling. The silk slid against her bare legs, cold, licking her skin and sending a shiver of excitement through her body. She thrilled at the wonder of everything. ‘Do I look pretty, Mama?’

  Maria cried, emotional because Poppy would be given to her husband’s family, officially leaving her and the Kondulakis tribe.

  ‘Aphrodite herself could not compete with you today, child,’ Maria said, smiling through tears.

  Poppy wore make-up. Powdered rouge blushed her cheeks. Lipstick, which tasted of paraffin wax, framed her mouth. Her eyes were enhanced with mascara, a hard little block, spat on and then applied to her lashes with a tiny brush.

  Matthia tugged myrtle branches from shrubs in the gully and spread them in a wide path from the house, all the way down to the church.

  Stavro and his friends waited outside the cottage, playing their lira, bouzouki, and mandolin. They drank raki and sang the old Cretan wedding mantinades.

  Time to say goodbye

  To your parents’ bed.

  A better place awaits

  Next to the man you wed.

  And if your groom should die,

  His bones to rest in clay,

  His heart so full of love

  With you will always stay.

  As was customary when celebrating a marriage, the village men wore their best beige jodhpurs, highly polished knee-high boots, and a black shirt. They exchanged their usual black saríki scarf for the white one traditionally worn at weddings and baptisms. The loosely crocheted saríki wrapped about the head and knotted over the right ear. Each man also wound a long red sash around his waist to keep his ornate Cretan dagger in place. Moustaches were waxed and beards trimmed.

  Most of the women wore black, as they had since the massacre.

  A peal of bells beckoned the congregation and the streets were filled with locals. They rushed from their houses, eager to get a good spot in the church. Young people carried chairs for the elderly, to sit in the churchyard through the ceremony. Trays of cakes were stacked in the portico, to hand out after the marriage.

  Agapi came running. ‘It’s time to go. Come on everybody!’

  ‘Agapi, promise we’ll stay friends after I’m married,’ Poppy said, suddenly afraid; aware that sixteen was not as grown up as she pretended.

  ‘Of course we will. I have to make sure my brother treats you well.’ Poppy hugged her and Agapi whispered outrageous things about the forthcoming wedding bed.

  Older women loaded neat bundles of dowry bedding onto the baker’s donkey. Constantina had crocheted a white saríki for the animal’s head. A row of tassels swished above its eyes and its great ears poked out of two holes in the lacy scarf. They tied long ribbons to its mane and tail and patted it admiringly.

  The donkey’s penis suddenly extended. It almost reached the ground and the girls screamed with laughter. The beast brayed. A matriarch whacked the shaft with her walking stick, which solved the problem, but the animal got skittish and bucked-off the bundles of linen.

  ‘I hope that’s not an omen,’ Maria said to Poppy, giving the donkey a bucket of water to calm it.

  ‘Start the music before anything else happens,’ Voula yelled at Stavro.

  Vassili appeared with Poppy’s bouquet. He went down on one knee, as was the tradition, and presented the flowers to her. The last gift a Cretan father ever gives his daughter because, in a few hours, she will belong to another man.

  His black eyes glistened below the heavy tassels of his saríki. ‘My precious girl, you look like an angel,’ he said. ‘You brought me sixteen years of joy, Calliope Kondulakis. I have truly been blessed.’

  Vassili stood and held her gently in his arms. ‘Go to your man with my blessing, daughter, but don’t forget your old father.’

  Poppy saw Vassili’s tears brimming and her young heart broke for the first time in her life. ‘I’m never leaving you, Papa, I promise. Please don’t be sad.’ She kissed his cheeks, his forehead, and his mouth. And with her gentle embrace, his tears broke free.

  At six p.m., when the heat of the day had fallen, the marriage took place. A bouzouki player led the groom and all his relations through the village. Poppy heard the locals whistle and applaud vigorously when Yeorgo reached the church.

  The time had come for the bride’s procession to make its way through the streets. First came the musicians and the donkey, followed by Poppy between Maria and Vassili.

  The entire Kondulakis tribe walked behind them; then friends of the family and anyone else that cared to join in the celebration. Crushed myrtle leaves underfoot filled the evening air with exotic perfume. In the churchyard, the beribboned beast, loaded with dowry linen, was formally presented to Constantina. The local women led the donkey to the bride’s new home, next-door to her in-laws. At the church, Vassili kissed Yeorgo on the lips and gave Poppy’s hand to him.

  Earnestly, Vassili said to Yeorgo, ‘Make my child miserable for one single second and I’ll break your legs before I kill you.’ Then he raised his voice and shouted, ‘Yeorgo Lambrakis, I give you my daughter, Calliope Kondulakis!’

  ‘My only girl has gone to Lambrakis!’ Maria wailed. Her knees folded and she almost collapsed to the ground. The women caught and fussed her, as tradition dictated.

  ‘Where’s the po
megranate?’ Vassili called out, and when somebody handed the huge fruit to him, he hurled it at the church doorstep.

  It split and the seeds that symbolise fertility flew everywhere. Agapi and Voula had lifted Poppy’s skirt and red juice splattered her shins. Everyone whistled and clapped but, for a sickening moment, Poppy thought the crimson liquid looked like blood running down her legs. Her belly cramped and a half-realised vision of wailing women thundered inside her head.

  Everybody surged into the church.

  The building filled to the door, yet people still tried to enter. Constantina spat three times on the step to send the devil away and stop him from interfering in the marriage. The congregation crossed themselves repeatedly and even the icons on the walls seemed a little less miserable.

  The service went perfectly until the young priest, Papas Christos, had to ask whoever was smoking to go outside the church. Minutes later, he asked if the women could please find the self-discipline to stop talking. Their Koumbaros, the best man, was short in stature and couldn’t reach over Yeorgo’s head with the wedding crowns. Somebody brought a chair. Even Papas Christos chuckled.

  The priest blessed Poppy and Yeorgo and, swinging the thurible, led them three times around the holy table. Still wearing their crowns, joined by the ribbon, they held hands and suffered a deluge of rice from relatives. Poppy kept her head down and placed her free hand over her cleavage to stop the grains sliding inside her dress.

  After the first turn, Poppy looked up and beamed at her parents. Yeorgo’s brother stood next to them. Her smile fell. Emmanouil glared at her. His mouth was swollen and split. His look, satanic, bored into her with a promise of reprisal that stopped her dead. Aware that she was the centre of attention, Poppy tried to hide her fear. A sneer slid across Emmanouil’s face; his dark eyes emotionless as death as his tongue slithered out to caress his bruised lip.

  The priest tugged Poppy’s hand.

  ‘Keep up, little one,’ Yeorgo said, laughing, unaware of the incident. Poppy broke her stare from Emmanouil. On the third circling of the holy table, her heart lurched when she saw he had gone.