‘I know, I know,’ replied Lapakis wearily, ‘but now that our patients are coming from mainland Greece as well as Crete, the government is obliged to come up with some funding. And when you meet a few more of the lepers we have here, you’ll see they’re not the sort to take no for an answer. But what brought you back to Crete? I was so glad to get your letter, but you didn’t really say why you were coming here.’
The two men began to speak with the easy intimacy of those who had spent their student years together. They had both been at medical school in Athens, and although six years had passed since they had last met, they were able to pick up their friendship as if they had never been apart.
‘It’s quite simple, really,’ said Kyritsis. ‘I’d grown tired of Athens, and when I saw a post advertised at the hospital in Iraklion in the Department of Dermatovenereology I applied. I knew I’d be able to continue my research, especially with the large number of lepers you now have here. Spinalonga is altogether a perfect place for a case study. Would you be happy for me to make occasional visits - and, more importantly, do you think the patients would tolerate it?’
‘I certainly have no objection, and I am sure they wouldn’t either.’
‘At some point, there might even be some new treatments to try out - though I’m not promising anything dramatic. To be honest, the results of the latest remedies have been singularly unimpressive. But we can’t stand still, can we?’
Lapakis sat at his desk. He had listened intently and his heart had lifted with every word that Kyritsis had spoken. For five long years he had been the only doctor prepared to visit Spinalonga, and during that time he had treated a relentless stream of the sick and the dying. Every night when he undressed for bed he checked his ample body for signs of the disease. He knew this was ridiculous and that the bacteria could be living in his system for months or even years before he was aware of their presence, but his deep anxieties were one of the reasons he only came across to Spinalonga on three days a week. He had to give himself a fighting chance. His role here was a calling that he had felt obliged to follow, but he feared the possibility of his remaining free of leprosy was no greater than the prospect of a long life for a man who regularly played Russian roulette.
Lapakis did have some help now. It was at precisely the moment when he could no longer cope with the slow wave of the sick who hobbled up the hill each day, some to stay for weeks and others just to have their bandages and dressings replaced, that Athina Manakis arrived. She had been a doctor in Athens before discovering that she had leprosy and admitting herself to the leprosarium there before being sent to Spinalonga with the rest of the Athenian rebels. Here she had a new role. Lapakis could not believe his luck: here was someone not only willing to live in at the hospital but who also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of general practice; just because they were leprous it did not stop the inhabitants of Spinalonga from suffering from a whole gamut of other complaints, such as mumps, measles and simple earache, and these ailments were often left unattended. Athina Manakis’s twenty-five years’ experience and her willingness to work every hour except those when she slept made her invaluable, and Lapakis did not at all mind the fact that she treated him as though he was a younger brother who needed knocking into shape. If he had believed in God, he would have thanked Him heartily.
Now, out of the blue - or, more accurately, out of the grey of this November day when sea and sky competed with each other for drabness - Nikolaos Kyritsis had arrived, asking if he could make regular visits. Lapakis could have wept with relief. His had been a lonely and thankless job and now his isolation had come to an end. When he left the hospital at the end of each day, washing himself down with a sulphurous solution in the great Venetian arsenal that now served as the disinfection room, there would no longer be a nagging sense of inadequacy. There was Athina, and now there would sometimes be Kyritsis.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Come as often as you wish. I can’t tell you how delighted I would be. Tell me what you’d be doing exactly.’
‘Well,’ said Kyritsis, taking off his jacket and hanging it carefully over the back of the chair, ‘there are people in the field of leprosy research who are sure that we are getting closer to a cure. I’m still attached to the Pasteur Institute in Athens and our director-general is very keen on pushing things forward as fast as we can. Imagine what it would mean, not just to the hundreds of people here but to thousands around the world - millions even in India and South America. The impact of a cure would be enormous. In my cautious opinion we’re still a long way off, but every piece of evidence, every case study, helps build a picture of how we can prevent the disease spreading.’
‘I’d like to think you’re wrong about it being a long way off,’ responded Lapakis. ‘I’m under such pressure these days to use quack remedies. These people are so vulnerable and they’ll grasp at any straw, particularly if they have the resources to pay. So what’s your plan here exactly?’
‘What I need are a few dozen cases that I can monitor very minutely over the next few months, even years, if it works out that way. I’ve been rather stuck in Iraklion on the diagnosis side and after that I lose my patients because they all come here! Nothing could be a better outcome for them from what I’ve seen, but I need to do some follow-ups.’
Lapakis was smiling. This was an arrangement that would suit them both equally. Along one wall of his office, reaching from floor to ceiling, were rows of filing cabinets. Some contained the medical records of every living inhabitant of Spinalonga. Others were where the records were transferred when they died. Until Lapakis had volunteered to work on the island, no papers had been kept. There had scarcely been any treatment worth noting and the only progress had been towards gradual degeneration. All that remained to remember the lepers by during the first few decades of the colony’s existence was a large black ledger listing name, date of arrival and date of death. Their lives were reduced to a single entry in a macabre visitors’ book and their bones now lay jumbled and indistinguishable under the stone slabs of the communal graves on the far side of the island.
‘I’ve got records of everyone who has been here since I came in 1934,’ said Lapakis. ‘I make detailed notes on their state when they arrive, and record every change as it happens. They’re in age order - it seemed as logical a way as any. Why don’t you go through them and pull out the ones you’d like to see, and when you next visit I can make appointments for them to come and meet you.’
Lapakis tugged open the heavy top drawer of the cabinet nearest to him. It overflowed with papers, and with a sweep of his arm he gave Kyritsis an open invitation to browse.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘I’d better get back to the ward. Some of the patients will be in need of attention.’
An hour and a half later, when Lapakis returned to his office, there was a stack of files on the floor; the name on the front of the top one was ‘Eleni Petrakis’.
‘You met her husband this morning,’ commented Lapakis. ‘He’s the boatman.’
They made a note of all the chosen patients, had a brief discussion about each and then Kyritsis glanced at the clock on the wall. It was time to go. Before he entered the disinfectant room to spray himself - though he knew this measure to try and limit the spreading of bacteria was futile - the two men shook hands firmly. Lapakis then led him back down the hill to the tunnel entrance, and Kyritsis continued alone to the quayside, where Giorgis was waiting, ready to take him on the first stage of his long journey back to Iraklion.
Few words were exchanged on the return journey to the mainland. It seemed that they had run out of things to say on the way over. When they reached Plaka, however, Kyritsis asked Giorgis whether he could be there on the same day the following week to take him across to Spinalonga. For some reason he could not quite fathom, Giorgis felt pleased. Not just because of the fare. He was simply glad to know that the new doctor, as he thought of him, would be back.
Through the bitter cold of December, the arctic temperatures of January and February and the howling gales of March, Nikolaos Kyritsis continued to visit every Wednesday. Neither he nor Giorgis was a man for small talk, but they did strike up short conversations as they crossed the water to the leper colony.
‘Kyrie Petrakis, how are you today?’ Kyritsis would ask.
‘I’m well, God willing,’ Giorgis would reply with caution.
‘And how is your wife?’ the doctor would ask, a question that made Giorgis feel like a man with an ordinary married life. Neither of them dwelt on the irony that the person asking the question knew the answer better than anyone.
Giorgis looked forward to Kyritsis’s visits, and so did twelve-year-old Maria, as they brought a hint of optimism and the possibility that she might see her father smile. Nothing was said, it was just something she could sense. In the late afternoon she would go to the quayside and wait for them to return. Wrapping her woollen coat tightly around her, she would sit and watch the little boat making its way back across the water in the greyness of dusk, catching the rope from her father and tying it expertly to the post to secure it for the night.
By April, the winds had lost their bite and there was a subtle change in the air. The earth was warming up. Purple spring anemones and pale pink orchids had broken through, and migrating birds flew over Crete making their way back from Africa after winter. Everyone welcomed the change of season and the keenly anticipated warmth that would now arrive, but there were also less positive changes in the air.
War had raged in Europe for some time, but that very month Greece itself was overrun. The people of Crete were now living under the sword of Damocles; the colony’s newspaper,
The Spinalonga Star
, carried regular bulletins on the situation, and the newsreels that came with the weekly film stirred the population into a state of anxiety. What they feared most then happened: the Germans turned their sights on Crete.
Chapter Eight
‘MARIA, MARIA!’ SCREAMED Anna from the street below her sister’s window. ‘They’re here! The Germans are here!’ There was panic in her voice, and as Maria galloped two steps at a time down the stairs, she fully expected to hear the sound of steel-tipped boots marching down the central street of Plaka.
‘Where?’ Maria demanded breathlessly, colliding with her sister in the street. ‘Where are they? I can’t see them.’
‘They’re not right here, you idiot,’ retorted Anna. ‘Not yet anyway, but they are here on Crete and they could be coming this way.’
Anyone who knew Anna well would have spotted a hint of excitement in her voice. Her view was that anything that broke the monotony of an existence governed by the predictable pattern of the seasons and the prospect of living the rest of her life in this same village was to be welcomed.
Anna had run all the way from Fotini’s house, where a group of them had been gathered around a crackling radio. They had just about made out the news that German paratroopers had landed in the west of Crete. Now the girls both raced to the village square where, at times like this, everyone would gather. It was late afternoon but the bar was overflowing with men and, unusually, women, all clamouring to listen to the radio, though of course drowning much of it out with their din.
The broadcast information was stark and limited. ‘At around six o’clock this morning a number of paratroopers landed on Cretan soil near the airfield of Maleme. They are all believed to be dead.’
It seemed after all that Anna was wrong. The Germans had not really arrived at all. As usual, thought Maria, her sister had overreacted.
There was tension in the air, however. Athens had fallen four weeks earlier and the German flag had fluttered over the Acropolis since then. This had been disturbing enough, but to Maria, who had never been there, Athens seemed a long way off. Why should events there bother the people of Plaka? Besides, thousands of Allied troops had just arrived on Crete from the mainland, so surely that would make them safe? When Maria listened to the adults around her arguing and debating and throwing in their opinions on the war, her sense of security was reinforced by what they said.
‘They haven’t got a chance!’ scoffed Vangelis Lidaki, the bar owner. ‘The mainland’s one thing, but not Crete. Not in a million years! Look at our landscape! They couldn’t
begin
to get across our mountains with their tanks!’
‘We didn’t exactly manage to keep the Turks out,’ retorted Pavlos Angelopoulos pessimistically.
‘Or the Venetians,’ piped up a voice in the crowd.
‘Well, if this lot come anywhere near here, they’ll get more than they bargained for,’ growled another, punching a fist into his open palm.