She received the news silently and felt sick. Not for a moment did she think of how Maria and Kyritsis might be feeling or what it had cost them to tell her the truth after all this time. No. This was
her
story,
her
life that they had falsified, and she was angry.
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ she screamed.
‘We wanted to protect you,’ said Kyritsis firmly. ‘There seemed no need to tell you before.’
‘We have loved you as your own parents would have loved you,’ interjected Maria pleadingly.
She was desperate enough to be losing her only child to university, but even more distressed that the girl who stood in front of her and looked at her as though she was a stranger would no longer regard her as her mother. Months and years had gone by when the fact that Sofia was not their own flesh and blood had had no relevance, and they had loved her all the more perhaps because they had been unable to produce children of their own.
At this moment, however, Sofia just saw them as people who had lied to her. She was eighteen, irrational, and resolved now in her desire to invent a future for herself where she would be in command of the facts. Her anger gave way to a
froideur
that brought her emotions under control but chilled the hearts of the people who loved her most in the world.
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she said, getting up. ‘The boat leaves at nine.’
With that, she turned on her heel.
The following morning Sofia was up at dawn doing her final packing, and at eight o’clock she and Kyritsis loaded her luggage into the car. Neither of them spoke. All three of them drove down to the port, and when the moment came, Sofia’s farewells were perfunctory.
She kissed each of them on both cheeks.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘I’ll write.’
There was a finality about her adieu that gave no promise of short-term reunion. They trusted her to write, but they knew already that there was no purpose in watching for letters. As the ferry pulled away from its moorings, Maria was certain this was the worst that life could bring. People standing beside them were waving a loved one a fond farewell, but of Sofia there was no sign. She was not even on deck.
Maria and Kyritsis stood watching until the boat was a speck on the horizon. Only then did they turn away. The emptiness was unbearable.
For Sofia, the journey to Athens became a flight from her past, from the stigma of leprosy and the uncertainty of her parentage. A few months into her first term, she was ready to write.
Dear Mother and Father (or should I call you Uncle and Aunt? Neither seems quite right any more),
I am sorry things were so difficult when I left. I was terribly shocked. I can’t even begin to put it into words and I still feel sick when I think about it all. Anyway, I am just writing to let you know that I am settling in well here. I am enjoying my lectures, and though Athens is much bigger and dustier than Agios Nikolaos, I am getting used to it all.
I will write again. I promise.
Love,
Sofia
The letter said everything and nothing. They continued to receive notes that were descriptive and often enthusiastic but gave away little of how Sofia was feeling. At the end of the first year, they were bitterly disappointed, if not entirely surprised, when she did not return for the vacation.
She became obsessed with her past and decided to spend the summer trying to trace Manoli. At first the trail seemed warm and she followed a few leads around Athens and then other parts of Greece. Then her sources became imprecise, phone books and tax offices for example, and she simply knocked on the door of any stranger who happened to be called Vandoulakis; the two of them would then stand there awkwardly before Sofia briefly explained herself and apologised for troubling them. The trail, such as it was, went stone cold, and one morning she woke up in a hotel in Thessalonika wondering what on earth she was doing. Even if she found this man, she would not know for sure if he were her father. Would she, in any case, prefer her father to have been a murderer who had killed her mother, or an adulterer who had abandoned her? It was not much of a choice. Should she not turn away from the uncertainty of her past and build a future?
At the beginning of her second year, she met someone who turned out to be a much more significant figure in her life than her father, whoever he might have been. He was an Englishman by the name of Marcus Fielding and he was on sabbatical at the university for a year. Sofia had never met anyone quite like him. He was big and bearish with a pale complexion that tended to blotchiness when he was embarrassed or hot, and he had very blue eyes, which were a rare thing to see in Greece. He also looked permanently crumpled in a way that only an Englishman could.
Marcus had never had a real girlfriend. He had generally been too wrapped up in his studies or too shy to pursue women, and he had found the sexually liberated London of the early 1970s intimidating. Athens during the same period was well behind in this revolution. In his first month at the university he met Sofia in a whole group of other students and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Though she seemed quite wordly, she was not unapproachable, and he was astonished when she accepted an invitation from him.
Within weeks they were inseparable, and when it was time for Marcus to return to England she made the decision that she would forgo the rest of her course in order to go with him.
‘I have no ties,’ she said one night. ‘I’m an orphan.’
When he protested, she assured him it was true.
‘No, really, I am,’ she said. ‘I have an uncle and aunt who brought me up but they’re in Crete. They won’t mind me going to London.’
She said no more about her upbringing and Marcus did not pursue it, but what he did insist was that they should marry. Sofia needed no persuasion. She was completely and passionately in love with this man and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would never let her down.
One chilly February day, the kind when frost lingers until midday, they married in a south London registry office. The invitation, an informal one, had stood on the high shelf above Maria and Nikolaos’s fireplace for a few weeks. It would be the first time they had seen Sofia since the day she had sailed out of their lives. The searing pain of abandonment that they had felt so keenly at first gradually eased and gave way to the dull ache of acceptance. They both approached the wedding with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
They liked Marcus instantly. Sofia could not have found herself a kinder, more dependable man, and to see her so content and secure was as much as they could have wished for, even if it was tainted by the fact that there was little likelihood now that she would ever return to settle in Crete. They enjoyed the English wedding, though it seemed to lack all the ritual and tradition that they were used to. It was just like an ordinary party except there were a few speeches, and what was strangest of all was that the bride did not really stand out from the other guests, dressed as she was in a red trouser suit. Maria, who spoke no English at all, was introduced to everyone as Sofia’s aunt, and Nikolaos, who spoke excellent English, as her uncle. They remained at each other’s side throughout, Kyritsis acting as translator for his wife.
Afterwards they stayed in London for two nights. Maria, particularly, was baffled by this city where Sofia had now chosen to live. It was another planet to her, a place that throbbed incessantly with the sound of car engines, monstrous red buses and heaving crowds filing past windows of slim mannequins. It was a city where, even if you were a resident, the chances of bumping into anyone you knew were nonexistent. It was the first and last time Maria ever left her native island.
Even with her husband Sofia had explored the no-man’s-land between secrets and lies. She convinced herself that concealment, the act of
not
telling something, was very different from telling something that was untrue. Even when her own children were born - Alexis, the first of them, only a year after the wedding - she vowed never to speak to them of her Cretan family. They would be guarded from their roots and forever protected from the deep shame of the past.
In 1990, at the age of eighty, Dr Kyritsis died. Several short obituaries, no more than a dozen or so lines long, appeared in British newspapers, praising him for his contribution to leprosy research, and Sofia carefully cut them out and filed them away. In spite of an age gap of nearly twenty years, Maria survived him by only five years. Sofia flew out to Crete for a perfunctory two days for her aunt’s funeral and was overwhelmed by guilt and loss. She realised that her eighteen-year-old self had shown nothing but self-centred ingratitude in the way she had left Crete all those years before, but it was too late now to make amends. Far, far too late.
It was at this point that Sofia decided she would finally erase her background. She disposed of the few keepsakes of her mother’s and her aunt’s that lived in a box at the back of her wardrobe, and one afternoon, before the children returned home from school, a stack of yellowing envelopes with Greek stamps was burned on the fire. She then removed the backing from the framed photograph of her uncle and aunt and discreetly tucked the newspaper cuttings précising Kyritsis’s life to a few sentences behind the picture. This record of their happiest day now lived by Sofia’s bedside and was all that remained of her past.
By destroying the physical evidence of her history, Sofia had tried to shrug off her background but the fear of its discovery ate into her like a disease and, as the years passed, the guilt over how she had treated her aunt and uncle intensified. It sat in the pit of her stomach like a stone, a regret that sometimes made her feel physically sick when she realised there was nothing she could do to make amends. Now that her own children had left home, she felt more keenly than ever the agony of remorse and knew for certain that she had caused unforgivable pain.
Marcus had known better than to ask too many questions and went along with Sofia’s desire to avoid any reference to her past, but as the children grew up, the Cretan characteristics were unmistakable: in Alexis the beautiful dark hair and in Nick the black lashes that framed his eyes. All the while Sofia feared that her children might one day discover what sort of people their ancestors had been, and her stomach churned. Looking at Alexis now, Sofia wished she had been more open. She saw her daughter scrutinising her as though she had never seen her before. It was her own fault. She had made herself a stranger both to her children and to her husband.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said to Alexis, ‘that I’ve never told you any of this before.’
‘But why are you so ashamed of it all?’ Alexis asked, leaning forward. ‘It’s your life story, sort of, but at the same time you played no part in it.’
‘These people were my flesh and blood, Alexis. Lepers, adulterers, murderers—’
‘For goodness’ sake, Mum, some of these people were heroic. Take your uncle and aunt - their love survived everything, and your uncle’s work saved hundreds, if not thousands, of people. And your grandfather! What an example he’d be to people nowadays, never complaining, never disowning anyone, suffering it all in silence.’
‘But what about my mother?’
‘Well, I’m glad she wasn’t
my
mother, but I wouldn’t blame her entirely. She was weak, but she’d always had that rebellious streak, hadn’t she? It sounds as though she always found it harder than Maria to do what she was meant to. It was just the way she was made.’
‘You’re very forgiving, Alexis. She was certainly flawed, but shouldn’t she have fought harder against her natural instincts?’
‘We all should, I suppose, but not everyone has the strength. And it sounds as though Manoli exploited her weakness as much as he possibly could - just as people like that always do.’
There was a pause in their exchange. Sofia fiddled anxiously with her earring as though there was something she wanted to say but she could not quite spit it out.
‘But you know who behaved worse than anyone?’ she eventually blurted out. ‘It was me. I turned my back on those two kind, wonderful people. They’d given me everything and I rejected them!’
Alexis was stunned by her mother’s outburst.
‘I just turned my back on them,’ Sofia repeated. ‘And now it’s too late to say sorry.’