Among the Lemon Trees

by Nadia Marks

  As most families had several olive trees growing in and around their land the harvest spirit affected everybody and not just those with the big olive groves. Very much like the production of homemade wine, producing olive oil was a tradition that went back centuries, passed down from family to family.

  The Levanti brothers had more than two dozen trees between them and in a good year, when the rains were plentiful, the trees would reward them with a healthy crop and keep both families in oil for a long while.

  Alexis had been gone a year when the olive harvest was once again in full swing. There had been plenty of rain in the spring and autumn, and the trees were heavy with fruit. The family would come together for a few hours in the early evenings and after church on Sundays for olive gathering. It was on such a Sunday morning, when the sun was as warm as a May day, and the fat juicy olives glistened amongst the silvery leaves, that Ourania and Calliope decided to postpone their school work till the evening and join in the family fun.

  Everyone, friends and relatives, would team up and get involved in the picking of the olives, although, strictly speaking, picking was not what the harvesting entailed. Beating the fruit off the trees would be a more accurate way to describe what they did. Nets and sheets would be spread underneath the trees to catch the olives that were brought down with long poles, sticks and rakes. Fit adults and older boys would take turns to climb the wooden ladders propped up against the trees to shake or saw off branches that landed with a great thud on the nets below. It was dangerous but exciting work, which was performed with good humour, laughter and song, anticipated each year with as much excitement as the great pyre constructed in the churchyard at Easter to burn the effigy of Judas.

  Ourania and Calliope were glad to be outside again participating in physical activity, away from their pens and books for a time. With just a few months to go before Ourania’s entrance exams to the teachers’ training academy, and the volume of homework, neither of the girls had much time for anything else. Ourania was feeling particularly happy; Alexis’s last letter had been very positive and full of plans for what he hoped would soon be their reunion. The fresh air and warm November sun was exhilarating and both sisters were in high spirits.

  ‘Remember that year when Alexis bashed his hand with the rake so hard he broke his wrist and he was running around screaming like a girl?’ Ourania told everyone, laughing.

  ‘How can I forget?’ Aphrodite replied, stopping to catch her breath. ‘I was ready to break his other wrist for being so stupid!’

  ‘That boy never listened!’ shouted Chrisoula from where she was standing. ‘He always did dangerous things when he was young.’

  ‘What about that time when my old dad picked up the sack full of olives which split open and spilled them all over the place?’ Costandis reminded them from halfway up a ladder.

  ‘That was funny!’ one of the cousins replied. ‘You all started shouting at him . . . Poor Bappou, he was so embarrassed!’

  ‘Oh yes, do you remember? We had to pick up all the olives one by one,’ another relative laughed, reaching out to beat a branch that had just landed in front of him.

  ‘It wasn’t really his fault,’ Ourania said, ‘poor Grand-father! The sack got caught on the rake and ripped without him noticing.’

  The good-natured chatter and reminiscing went on as people worked, and the mood on that November Sunday was jovial and happy.

  ‘All right, everyone! I need a break now,’ Andrikos suddenly shouted, looking down from a gnarled old olive tree he was sitting on, wiping his brow with a big white handkerchief. He’d spent most of the morning either up a ladder or on a tree and he’d now had enough.

  ‘Well come down then! I’ll take over,’ Calliope shouted to her father, eager to climb the tree before one of the male cousins got in before her.

  ‘I’m next!’ shouted Ourania, always competing with her sister when it came to tomboy tactics.

  ‘You wait your turn!’ Calliope shouted back and started climbing the ladder.

  Each person had a task, everyone knew exactly what they had to do and they all worked together in peaceful synergy. At some point, someone began to sing and gradually one by one they all joined in. Young voices and old voices all melted together in a lilting island song that spoke of the sea and her fishermen, the fishing boats and their precious load of coral and pearls. The humming of the bees, the twittering birds and the singing voices, all merged into one while the sun beat down on everyone’s back and the sky rained big hard purple, black and green olives.

  The loud dull thud which made the ground vibrate around everyone’s feet was quite different from the sound of a branch hitting the earth. Abruptly the singing stopped. Everybody froze. An icy silence brushed over them. There, right in front of everyone, amongst the leaves, branches and fallen olives, lay Calliope. She was sprawled out like a broken doll, having just fallen out of the tree, and still clutching the branch she had been sitting on.

  Everyone stood mute and very still. Chrisoula was the first to break the silence: with a piercing scream, she rushed towards her daughter. As if a spell was broken people jumped into action and rushed forward, apart from Ourania, who was rooted to the ground unable to move. She blinked several times, expecting that each time she looked again the scene in front of her would be different. But what she continued to see was her mother kneeling over her sister’s apparently lifeless body.

  ‘Panayia mou!’ Chrisoula was screaming. ‘She’s not breathing! Quick, someone get the doctor.’

  All at once everyone started yelling and crying, jolting Ourania out of her trance. Panic and adrenalin kicking in, Ourania turned on her heels and started to run and run and didn’t stop until she was pounding at Dr Doumas’s front door.

  ‘My sister, my sister! Doctor, doctor!’ she yelled through sobs and tears. ‘Come quick! She’s stopped breathing!’

  Calliope’s fall wasn’t fatal. When the doctor arrived he was relieved to discover that she was in fact still breathing and thankful that no one had attempted to move her. She was, he said, suffering from concussion and had to be taken to the hospital immediately. A makeshift stretcher was constructed from the nets and sheets on the ground, and under the doctor’s instructions, slowly and with great care, Calliope was placed in his car and driven to the hospital, her mother and Ourania by her side.

  Apart from a fractured elbow and three broken fingers, Calliope had suffered no other apparent injuries. However, despite the doctor’s initial assumption that she was merely concussed, she had in fact fallen into a coma. No further diagnosis of her alarming condition could be made until she recovered consciousness. The whole time Calliope slept, Ourania would anxiously scan her face for the slightest movement, but she remained motionless and pale, her chestnut curls a halo around her head. For sixteen days and nights Ourania refused to go home or to school and stayed by her sister’s bedside, until finally one morning Calliope snapped her eyes open and started talking to her.

  ‘Ourania! What’s going on? Why am I in bed?’ she asked, bewildered.

  ‘Good morning, sleepyhead!’ Ourania replied, trying to sound cheerful for fear of betraying her worry. ‘Do you remember falling out of a tree?’ she asked and bent down to cover her in kisses.

  ‘I remember flying,’ Calliope replied, looking around the ward, ‘but why am I in hospital?’

  ‘You weren’t very successful at flying and you fell to the ground!’

  ‘Ouch! That must have hurt!’ Calliope smiled. ‘Am I OK?’

  ‘Yes! And now that you have woken up you’ll be even better, but you gave us all such a fright.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. How long was I asleep?’ she asked, lifting her hand to look at her bandaged fingers.

  ‘A little longer than your usual lie-in.’

  ‘Can I go home now?’ she asked again and tried to sit up.

  ‘We have to wait for the doctor. He told me I had to get him the minute you opened your eyes.’

  ‘Ca
n I sit up and wait for him?’ Calliope asked as if everything was back to normal.

  ‘Perhaps we should wait.’ Ourania was hesitant. ‘Dr Doumas has been looking after you.’

  ‘I’d like to move a little, I feel so stiff,’ Calliope said and tried to shift herself up to a sitting position but her elbow gave way beneath her, causing her to fall back again.

  ‘Help me sit up, Ourania mou, I’ve no strength,’ she said and reached out for her sister’s arm.

  ‘It’s not very surprising you are weak.’ Ourania put an arm round her sister’s waist to help her up.

  Leaning on Ourania, Calliope tried to shift herself into a sitting position on the bed but found it impossible.

  ‘That’s strange,’ she said, ‘I don’t seem to have any strength at all.’ Suddenly it hit her. ‘My legs . . . it’s my legs!’ Calliope said in an almost inaudible whisper. ‘I can’t feel them!’

  6

  Contrary to what everyone had hoped, Calliope’s fall had been a very bad one. She’d been too foolhardy and high-spirited that day and had climbed way up into the tree’s top branches. Her bones might have been able to withstand the force of impact with minimal injury, but the trauma and damage to her spinal cord resulted in a neurological condition causing total paralysis of both of her legs, and partial paralysis of her left arm.

  Chrisoula was inconsolable and kept blaming Andrikos for letting Calliope go up the ladder in the first place, making the poor man feel more wretched than he already was. The shock was immense for everyone, but it was Ourania who took the news the hardest. She was totally devastated for her sister, yet tried her best not to show it; she knew she had no option but to be strong for Calliope because now it was her turn to support her.

  Life on a small Greek island in the 1930s was not conducive to major health problems. Dr Doumas was a good doctor and took good care of his patients but he was not equipped to deal with the severity of Calliope’s condition and the same went for the town’s hospital, which was some twenty kilometres away from the village. With its limited resources the hospital did the best it could for Calliope, but as always relied heavily on the patient’s family to help with their care. The only place Calliope would have received better medical treatment was in one of the larger hospitals on the mainland, where, if she was mobile, she could have been taken. But in her case, first in a coma and then paralysed, taking her anywhere, let alone putting her on a boat, was an impossible task.

  The months that followed after Calliope left the hospital, and until a wheelchair shipped over from the mainland arrived, were the hardest for everyone. Bed-bound, Calliope felt wretched and helpless, and the logistics of moving her whenever necessary were agonizingly difficult. Yet, together with her mother, her aunt and their other sisters, Ourania did everything, and more, for Calliope. They bathed her, and put her on the commode, fed her and brushed her hair, read her books, and sang her songs. Ourania did it all willingly and lovingly, knowing without a doubt that if the roles were reversed her sister would be doing the same for her.

  At first Calliope was in a state of denial; she expected that gradually her legs would recover their mobility until one day she would just get up from her wheelchair and walk again.

  ‘I feel a tingling in my toes,’ she’d tell Ourania. ‘Look, I think I can wiggle them.’ But of course she couldn’t.

  After her initial state of despair, slowly Calliope started to come to terms with her situation, making huge efforts to deal with it in a stoic and philosophical way, as was her nature.

  ‘If this is my fate, I must face it and continue with the life I have been granted,’ she told Ourania. ‘I can’t do anything about my legs, but I can do something about my soul. I do not want to live in constant misery.’

  But still, Ourania was distraught. She couldn’t bear to think that her sister was going to be an invalid for the rest of her life. They had so many dreams, they had made so many plans together. She couldn’t believe this could happen to them, because, in all earnest, Ourania felt that what had happened to her sister had also happened to her. They had shared a symbiotic relationship since early childhood and as their mother used to say, ‘They’re like one person those two. If one cuts herself, the other one bleeds!’

  But it was not Ourania who’d been crippled; she had the use of both of her legs and the ability to go wherever she liked, whenever she liked, yet the idea of going any distance without her sister didn’t enter her mind. It was months before she even considered going back to school, let alone thought about leaving the island to go and meet Alexis. The whole premise of their plan was that once she and Alexis were settled somewhere Calliope would join them. How could that ever happen now? How could she ever leave the island? Calliope couldn’t even sit up without help. Their dream was in shreds.

  Of course Ourania still thought of Alexis and continued to write to him, but perhaps not as often as before. She wrote and told him about the accident straight away, but that was when Calliope was still in her coma and before they knew the extent of her injuries. Once the severity of Calliope’s condition became apparent, Ourania’s focus shifted; for the time being her sister had become her number one priority. As much as she missed Alexis and longed to be with him, she could not imagine or contemplate leaving Calliope behind. What she desperately wished now was that Alexis had never left and that he was still there with them, lending his support.

  The long absence from school had seriously hindered Ourania’s entrance exams to the teachers’ training academy, but under the circumstances an exemption was made and she was allowed to resume her studies with a view to sitting her exams the following year. It was nearly ten months before she actually returned to school. A few months later Calliope decided to follow, determined to continue with her education too and resume some kind of normality in her life.

  Philipos, the bus driver, who loved the two sisters, had been extremely distressed to find out about Calliope’s condition. He melted with sadness at the sight of the young girl in her wheelchair and he went out of his way to be helpful. The first thing he did was to take out a seat at the front of his bus to make space for Calliope and her chair; then he made a contraption to enable her to be lifted onto the bus.

  After twenty years of blind obedience to time keeping, Philipos changed his timetable in each direction by twenty minutes in order to accommodate the extra time needed to get Calliope on and off the bus. In the evening, once the girls were safely dispatched and he could see they were on their way home, he would glance at the shrine on his dashboard, cross himself, and whisper a little prayer to the Holy Virgin to watch over his own girls. He knew all too well that the two sisters on the road, one in a wheelchair and the other pushing it, could easily have been his own two daughters.

  In the meantime, Alexis anxiously waited to receive more news from home about Calliope, but it was two months before a letter finally arrived telling him of her condition. Ourania’s initial letter to him had been full of hope and confidence that as soon as Calliope regained consciousness she was going to be fine, with just a few bruises and some broken fingers. He remembered people falling from trees during olive harvest and recalled some of his own foolish mishaps and dare-devil antics, but there had never been anything as serious as this before. Once he found out about the magnitude of Calliope’s situation he became very distressed; he loved his younger cousin and couldn’t begin to comprehend that she’d have to spend the rest of her life confined to a wheelchair. He felt guilty for not being with them back on the island at such a difficult time.

  Ever since he’d left, Alexis had done nothing but work long and hard, with only one aim in mind – to save enough money to send for his sweetheart. Now, just as he was nearing his goal, everything seemed to have gone wrong. If it wasn’t for Costandis and Uncle Georgios’s support and friendship, Alexis would have been desolate.

  During their time together, Alexis and Costandis had developed a real brotherly bond between them. At the end of each day the two o
f them would lie back on their bunks and talk until they fell asleep. Costandis was the first to take Alexis into his confidence, not long after they started working on the ship. He spoke about his life, about what made him leave his own home.

  ‘I left for the love of a girl called Xanthi,’ he confessed one night after they’d finished work and were taking a breather on deck. It was a beautiful, mild night and the two boys couldn’t bring themselves to go back down into the oppressive heat of their cabin. Costandis reached in his trouser pocket for his packet of cigarettes, stretched out on his back and started to talk. ‘I was fifteen when I first fell for her,’ he began, ‘and at first she didn’t even know I existed. The roof of our building overlooked her house and one day when I was helping my mother to hang out the washing, I discovered that I could see right into her room. From that day on, most days and evenings when the washing was up, I would hide behind it and watch her. To begin with she didn’t know I was there, and then one day as she stood by the open window brushing her hair she saw me! She didn’t move, just carried on brushing and looking across at me. Then, before she turned to walk away, she waved.

  ‘After that, she would come to the window and let me see her. She would usually brush her hair or just sit looking over at me and before turning away she’d always wave. Then one day, instead of waving, she blew me a kiss! That was it! I lived for the moment when I could see her. We’d sometimes pass each other in the street, or I would see her in church, but we never managed to speak, we just looked at each other. Her father was like a mad dog when it came to his only daughter. And her two brothers? Ha! They were even worse. It was a rich family, you see, and I was just a poor boy.

  ‘This long-distance love affair continued for a quite a time. I was nearly seventeen and she was almost eighteen by the time we actually first met face to face. Xanthi’s best friend would cover up for her and we started to meet secretly. It wasn’t very often but we managed it once in a while and that went on for a long time too until one of her brothers found out and then all hell broke loose. They threatened to cut my legs off and worse, if I ever went near their sister again, and they put Xanthi under lock and key.’