Maria shuddered to think of how Anna might be behaving. Her sister had never bothered with caution and nothing would change that now. Her real concern, however, was not Anna herself but the impact of her behaviour on their father. There was not one secure element in that poor dear man’s life, she thought.
‘Has she no shame?’ she muttered
‘I’m not sure she has,’ said Fotini.
The women tried to talk of other things, but conversation always began and ended with talk of Anna’s infidelity and speculation on how long it would be before Anna cast a careless glance in Manoli’s direction that might just make Andreas pause for a moment and wonder. Little by little, any residual feelings Maria might have had for Manoli evaporated. The only certainty she had was that there was nothing she could possibly do.
It was now late October. The winter winds were gaining strength and would soon penetrate the thickest overcoats and the heaviest of woollen wraps. It seemed to Maria that it was uncivilised to stand here in the perishing cold talking to Dr Kyritsis, but the thought of giving up their conversations was unbearable. She loved talking with this man. They seemed never to run out of things to say, even though she felt she had so little of interest to tell him. She could not help comparing the way he spoke to her with the way Manoli had talked. Her fiancé’s every sentence had been full of playful banter, but with Kyritsis there was not a flicker of flirtation.
‘I want to know what it’s really like to live here,’ he said to her one day as the wind gusted around them.
‘But you see the island every week. You must be as familiar with how it looks as I am,’ she said, rather puzzled by his statement.
‘I look at it, but I don’t see it,’ he said. ‘I see it as an outsider passing through. That’s very different.’
‘Would you like to come to my house and have some coffee?’ Maria had quietly practised saying these words for some time, but when they finally came out she hardly recognised her own voice.
‘Coffee?’ Kyritsis had heard her clearly enough, but repeated the word for want of something to say in response.
‘Would you?’
It was as though she had disturbed him from a reverie.
‘Yes, I think I would.’
They walked together through the tunnel. Though he was the doctor and she the patient, they walked side by side, like equals. Both of them had passed through the Venetian walls a hundred times, but this was a different kind of journey. Kyritsis had not walked a street like this in the company of a woman for years, and Maria, walking along with a man who was not her father, felt self-conscious in a way she thought she had left behind with childhood. Someone might see her and jump to the wrong conclusion. ‘It’s the doctor!’ she wanted to shout, desperate to spare herself from gossip.
Quickly she showed the way into the small alleyway close to the end of the tunnel and they entered her house. Maria began making coffee. She knew Kyritsis did not have long and would want to be punctual for his first appointment.
While Maria busied herself finding sugar, cups and saucers, Kyritsis looked about the room. It was much more comfortable and colourful than his own small apartment in Iraklion. He noticed the embroidered cloths, the picture of the young Kyria Petrakis with Maria and another girl on the wall. He saw a neat row of books, a jug containing leafy sprigs from an olive tree and bunches of lavender and herbs hanging to dry from the ceiling. He saw order and domesticity and felt warmed by them both.
Now that they were on Maria’s terrain, he felt he could get her to talk about herself. There was one burning question he wanted to ask. He knew so much about the disease, its symptoms, its epidemiology, its pathology, but of course he did not know what it really
felt
like to have leprosy and until now he had never thought of asking one of his patients.
‘How does it feel . . .’ he ventured, ‘to be a leper?’
The question seemed so personal, but Maria did not hesitate to answer.
‘In some ways I feel no different now than I did a year ago, but I
am
different because I’ve been sent here,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit like being in prison, for someone like me who’s not affected by the disease day to day. Except there are no locks on the door, no bars.’
As she said this, her mind went back to that cold autumn morning when she had left Plaka to come to Spinalonga. Life on a leper colony had certainly not been what she had wished for, but she paused for a moment and wondered what it would have been like had she married Manoli. Would that have been another kind of prison? What sort of man would betray his own family? What Judas would abuse the kindness and hospitality that had been shown him? She had been taken in by his charm but realised now that circumstances might have spared her. This was a man with whom she had not once had a conversation that touched anything deeper or broader than the olive harvest, the music of Mikis Theodorakis or whether to attend the saint’s day celebrations in Elounda. Such
joie de vivre
had attracted her at first but she realised that perhaps there was no more to him than that. Life with Manoli might have been just another kind of life sentence, no better than the one she was condemned to on Spinalonga.
‘There are lots of good things, though,’ she added. ‘Wonderful people like Elpida Kontomaris and the Papadimitrious and Dimitri. They have such spirit and, do you know something, even though they’ve been here an awful lot longer than I have, they never, ever complain.’
When she had finished speaking, Maria poured coffee into a cup and passed it to Kyritsis. She noticed, too late, that his hand trembled violently, and when he took the coffee, the cup clattered to the ground. A dark puddle spread across the stone floor and there was an awkward silence before Maria rushed to the sink to get a cloth. She sensed his profound embarrassment and was keen to relieve him of it.
‘Don’t worry, it’s fine,’ she said, mopping up, collecting the pieces of patterned china in a dustpan as she did so. ‘As long as you didn’t burn yourself.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have broken your cup. It was so clumsy of me.’
‘Don’t worry about it. What’s a cup?’
It was, in fact, a special cup, one of the set that her mother had brought from Plaka, but Maria realised that she did not mind at all. It was almost a relief that Kyritsis was not so perfect, not as impeccable in every way as he outwardly appeared.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come,’ Kyritsis mumbled. In his mind, it was a sign that he should not have broken the rules of professional etiquette in which he believed so strongly. By coming into Maria’s house for social reasons he had crossed a boundary with a patient.
‘Of course you should have come. I invited you and I would have been miserable if you hadn’t.’
Maria’s outburst was spontaneous, and more enthusiastic than she had really intended. It surprised Dr Kyritsis, but it also surprised her. Now they were even. Both had lost their composure.
‘Please stay and have some more coffee.’
Maria’s eyes looked into the doctor’s so imploringly that he could do nothing but accept. She took another cup from the rack, and this time, once the coffee was poured into it, she left it on the table for him to pick up safely.
They both sipped without speaking. Sometimes there is awkwardness in silence, but not this time. Eventually Maria broke the spell.
‘I hear a few people have started some drug treatment. Is it going to work?’ It was a question she had been longing to ask.
‘It’s quite early days, Maria,’ he answered. ‘But we have to hold out a little hope. We are aware of some contraindications to the treatment, which is why we have to be cautious at this stage.’
‘What kind of drug is it?’
‘Its full name is diphenyl sulphone, but it’s generally known as dapsone. It’s sulphur-based and potentially toxic. The key thing, though, is that any improvement generally takes place over the very long term.’
‘So it’s no magic potion then,’ said Maria, trying not to sound disappointed.
‘No, I’m afraid it’s not,’ said Kyritsis. ‘It’ll be a while before we really know if anyone will ever be fully cured. I’m afraid no one will be leaving quite yet.’
‘So that means you might be able to come for coffee another time?’
‘I very much hope so. You make such good coffee.’
Dr Kyritsis knew his answer was somehow gauche and that it implied he was only interested in coming because of the quality of her coffee. That was not at all how it was meant to sound.
‘Well, I had better be going now,’ he said, trying to cover his embarrassment. ‘Thank you.’ With that rather stiff farewell, Kyritsis left.
As she cleared the cups and swept the floor to remove the last shards of the broken cup, Maria heard herself humming. The sensation could only be described as a lightness of heart, an unfamiliar feeling in a grey place, but she would enjoy it and hope against hope that it would remain with her. All day she felt as though her feet did not quite touch the ground. She had much to do but each task felt a pleasure. As soon as she had tidied up, she bundled some of her herb jars into a rough basket and set off to see Elpida Kontomaris.
The elderly woman rarely locked her door, and Maria let herself in. She found Elpida in bed, pale but propped up on her pillows.
‘Elpida, how are you feeling today?’
‘I am actually feeling much better,’ she said. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘It’s thanks to nature, not to me,’ Maria corrected her. ‘I’m going to make another infusion for you. It’s obviously working. You’re to have a cupful of this now, one in about three hours, and then I will come back this evening to give you a third.’
For the first time in weeks, Elpida Kontomaris was beginning to feel well again. The griping stomach aches she had been suffering from finally seemed to be on the wane, and there was no doubt in her mind that her improvement was due to the soothing herbal medicines that Maria had been preparing for her. Though the skin on her elderly face sagged and her clothes hung off her like limp rags, her appetite was beginning to return and she could now imagine a time when she might eat properly again.
As soon as she had made sure that Elpida was comfortable, Maria was gone. She would return that evening to ensure that her patient took her next dose, but meanwhile she would spend the day at ‘the block’, as it was unaffectionately known. The large apartment building situated at the end of the main street was still unpopular. It felt lonely and desolate up there at the top of the hill. People preferred the cosiness of the small Turkish and Italian houses. The proximity of the older houses to each other helped promote a sense of community which mattered more to them than bright strip lighting and modern shutters.
Today Maria went there because four of the apartments were home to lepers who could no longer fend for themselves. These were the cases whose ulcerated feet had led to amputation, whose claw-like hands rendered them incapable of even the simplest domestic tasks and whose faces were deformed beyond recognition. In any other situation, the lives of these disfigured individuals would have been abjectly miserable. Even now several of them lived on the very brink of despair, but the efforts of Maria and a few other women like her never allowed them to go over it.
What these people cherished more than anything was their privacy. For one young woman, whose nose had been destroyed by leprosy and whose eyes were held permanently open through facial paralysis, the stares of her fellow colonists were insupportable. Occasionally she went out at night and crept into the church, alone with the dark icons and the comforting smell of melted candlewax, but otherwise, she would never go out, except for the very short monthly walk to the hospital, where Lapakis would chart any changes to her lesions and prescribe drugs to help lure her mind and body from an almost permanently wakeful state into one of short but blissful sleep. Another, slightly older woman had lost one of her hands. She was paying the highest price for the severe burns she had inflicted on herself while cooking for her family only a few months before coming to the island. Dr Lapakis had done everything he could to try and heal the ulcerated wounds, but the infection had got the better of both of them and his only choice had been to amputate. Her remaining hand was fixed in a claw. She could just about hold a fork, but she could not open a tin or do up a button.
Every one of the dozen or so extreme cases who lived here was hideously scarred. Most of them had arrived on Spinalonga in an acute state of decrepitude, and in spite of the hospital’s best efforts to ensure that no long-term damage was done to them by the numbing effects of the disease, it was not always possible to control it. They matched the biblical image of the leper and were as far along the hellish road to disfigurement as anyone could be while still being perceptibly human.