Escape to Ikaria Page 22

  I held Seth on my lap and Petros drove like a maniac along the coast road, taking us to the very edge as we rounded each bend. We were only inches away from crashing onto the rocks below, and in those dark moments I handed over our lives to whoever looks after our destinies.

  Suddenly, ahead of us, I saw Julia thumbing a lift. I yelled at Petros to stop and pick her up. I needed someone to help me think straight. She squeezed in the back, telling me Ros was foaming at the mouth and felt cold. She held Lysta in her arms until at last we arrived at the little Red Cross medical centre.

  I rushed in and found a young nurse who was taking a splinter from an elderly woman’s finger. She immediately rang for a doctor and while we waited it felt as though the whole world had stopped. Nothing was happening quickly enough. Petros came to me and, despite all our differences, spoke sympathetically.

  ‘You do not need me now. I hope your family is well soon.’

  I thanked him as we shook hands, and I warmed to him. He had shown another side of himself and where would we have been without his help.

  In ten minutes a doctor arrived. He examined Ros, Seth and Lysta, made three phone calls and then gave them each an injection.

  My name is Dr Papadopoulos,’ he said. ‘I’ll do all I can to help your family.’

  Lysta was sick first, soon followed by Ros and Seth. I felt their foreheads, hot and sweaty, while their bodies shivered as if they were freezing. I asked him how they were, what he was thinking. He seemed to have no sense of urgency, just checking their pulses.

  ‘Give it some time for the injection, yes, then we will see.’

  Julia wet some flannels and the two of us held them against their faces. Seth was delirious and calling for his mother. Again I confronted Dr Papadopoulos. ‘Is there no more you can do?’

  ‘We have to wait, you understand.’

  ‘For how bloody long?’

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps an hour.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Maybe we will have to fly them to Athens by helicopter.’

  ‘Let’s do it now!’ I said. ‘An hour might be too late.’

  ‘No, it is too soon. It is difficult, I know, but you must wait. Go and sit down.’

  There was nothing I could do, no one I could telephone, no one to turn to, and I raged against our helpless situation in that little Red Cross medical centre. Julia could see the state I was in and put consoling arms around me.

  ‘The doctor is right, we just have to wait. What else can we do?’

  Half an hour later Ros started to stir, and the nurse, who had done nothing to this point, got her to take a sip of water. She opened her eyes.

  ‘Ros, talk to me. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Give me some more water.’

  Dr Papadopoulos put his hand on my shoulder. ‘This is good.’

  Lysta too showed signs of coming back to consciousness, muttering, ‘Mum, where are you?’ She was feeling cooler now and managed to swallow a few drops of water.

  As for Seth, from being a dormant heap lying lifeless on the bed, he sat almost bolt upright and stared in silence before he burst into floods of tears. He’d never cried very much as a baby; even when he fell over he would just pick himself up. He was inconsolable for a few minutes, until he saw Ros trying to wave to him from the next bed.

  Then Sarah rushed in, out of breath, saying she had passed Petros on the road and he had told her what had happened.

  ‘It’s terrible! Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘It’s all right. Well, I think it is,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not ill,’ said Sam. ‘I didn’t eat any of the cheese.’

  ‘Cheese?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Cheese and rat poison,’ I said.

  After two hours they were on their feet, feeling groggy and weak, but recovering. Julia and Sarah stayed with us all the time, getting them to drink as much water as they could and comforting the children.

  Dr Papadopoulos, a man in his late forties whose furrowed brow prevented little beads of sweat from rolling down his face, explained to me what he thought had happened. All the symptoms he had treated were consistent with having eaten rat poison, but only small amounts had been digested. The body’s initial reaction is to go into shock, but he was sure this stage had now passed and in the morning the horrible experience would be behind them.

  ‘When can they eat again?’ I asked him.

  ‘When they are hungry.’

  We all got a taxi back to Lefkada, Julia and Sarah insisting they wanted to stay with us for the evening. Maria and Yannis met us, their deep concern showing on their faces.

  ‘What has happened?’ Maria cried, holding Ros’s face in her hands.

  Ros did her best to explain the whole story to them, while my thoughts were with Sister Ulita. It was too late to go and see her now. I tried to work out what had occurred, how poison had got on to the cheeses. The rats must have picked it up on their feet as they scurried around and then run over the food in the larder. I couldn’t think of any other answer.

  In the morning, you would never have known what Ros and the children had been through. They’d all slept well and were hungry for breakfast.

  When I got to the monastery Sister Ulita came towards me, more like a shadow than a physical being. A lonely figure, her mouth tight and tense, her head bowed, subdued as if defeated by the whole drama of yesterday. With Artemis gone and the sisters all back in Samos, she was alone again. And now I’d come to tell her that Ros and the children were all right but that we were leaving Ikaria in two days. Everyone was deserting her. And I would only be able to do it by stumbling through a basic phrase book, unable to inject any kind of sentiment and with no words of comfort.

  We sat at the table in the courtyard, and she handed me an envelope. Inside was a piece of paper, on it a single sentence. I have told Sister Ulita you are leaving. It had been written by Artemis. I was pleased that she knew. But now she wanted to say something to me and, following her finger below a few scribbled words, began to read to me slowly.

  ‘I know you are leaving . . . and I am sorry for this to be ending . . . I cry for your family all night.’

  That was all, and I knew she couldn’t find the words to express what she was going through. I think we both felt the utter frustration of not being able to speak one another’s language.

  She showed me the larder which was completely empty, scrubbed clean, smelling of disinfectant, no longer stacked with cheeses or jars of yoghurt.

  She looked such a solitary figure, standing alone in her Garden of Eden, isolated within her sacred world.

  Just as I was about to leave the sun broke through the clouds and I said to her, ‘Sister, ever since I have been here, no matter what the weather, you have never taken off your sunglasses.’

  She, of course, couldn’t understand what I was saying, and just stood there as I carefully lifted them away. And for the first time I saw her hazel eyes, watery from the tears she had shed. It was as if she had suddenly come into being and stepped out from herself and at last I could see what had been hidden for so long. A compassionate heart revealed itself in her kind eyes, a girlish embarrassment in her smile. Her smooth skin showed no line or wrinkle. The shock of the sunlight made her blink and she took the glasses back from me between her arthritic fingers, saying, ‘Ochi! Ochi!’

  That was the only time I saw her completely, just for those few seconds, but it was long enough to capture an image of her, and who she was. What had kept her behind those sunglasses, whether she had decided at some precise moment never to show herself to the world, I would never know. The intense emotions of that last morning when I sat with her at the courtyard table made me feel as if I was in some kind of waking trance. Only a half-open window suddenly blowing shut jerked me back to reality.

  In the minutes of silence that followed, I don’t think I had ever searched so hard for words to try to ease the pain we were both feeling. Surely it would not be possible in any language to
tell someone how much you had gained from knowing them and in the very next breath say goodbye.

  But that was how it felt, and when she found a crumpled piece of paper and flattened it out on the table top and looked at me and said ‘How are you enjoying your watermelon?’ I said ‘Bravo, Sister!’ just as I had before. ‘I like the watermelon very much.’

  I never saw her again, although I drove to the monastery gates with Datsun Jim on the morning of our last day on Ikaria. I had told him everything about Sister Ulita and the daily routine that was followed in the monastery. That he had his chance now to serve his new-found God, when all I really wanted him to do was look after her and make sure the goats were milked every day. He still didn’t believe we were leaving, even though I had told him at least six times, so I said it once more.

  ‘It is not good to go on saying this joke. I will see you later, my friend.’

  And now I felt we were friends, and as I watched him push open the monastery gates it struck me that he would not survive anywhere else but Ikaria. The world wouldn’t make allowances for such a wayward character, who would always need someone to look after him.

  It was the first time we had ordered a taxi, only because we had more luggage than we’d arrived with; all the stuff we’d accumulated, the children’s school notebooks, an Ikarian vase, bits of pottery Ros was taking home as mementos, and of course Wolf Solent that Sarah had given me.

  On that last day, Seth buried the skeletal remains of his collection of dead insects in the garden. Sam and Lysta carved their initials into the trunk of one of the eucalyptus trees, so small you would have needed a magnifying glass to see them. I wanted to know what the children would remember most from our time here. Sam said, straight away, the day the Ikarian army invaded Lefkada. For Lysta it was her friendship with Xenia. Already they had promised to write to one another every week. For Seth, it was chasing lizards with his butterfly net. Liz had survived in his (her?) box for two days before Seth had been persuaded to release him, but it was clear that a life without pets was not going to be on the cards when we got back to England.

  In the taverna for the last time, empty now, we said goodbye to Maria and Yannis. No one had given us more. It was hard to pull the children away from Maria, who didn’t want to let them go. She had been like a grandmother, spoiling us all with her treats.

  ‘I will keep on living so I can see you all next year,’ were her last words to us.

  As for Yannis, probably the most reserved man on the island, he hugged us all, even me.

  The taxi was nearly half an hour late – what else should we have expected – but I had allowed for it. We drove with the windows open, breathing in the sea air, staring across the Aegean to the island of Fourni in the distance. Every now and then we caught a whiff of thyme and the distinctive scent of fig trees. The day was pearlescent under nimbus clouds.

  How many times had I walked this road to Aghios, whether to go fishing with Stelios, or unload the potato boat, or go in search of Sam? All of us were unusually quiet, caught up in our memories.

  Ros had arranged with Agathi to meet at the Casino café, overlooking the harbour. They were the family we had grown closest to. Many friendships had been formed between us, apart from Seth and Leftari, who seemed wrapped up in their own worlds. They knew more about the situation we were facing when we returned home than anyone else, but it didn’t stop us from inviting them to visit us in England. Lysta was in the same state as when she said goodbye to Eleri and was now demanding that we stay in Ikaria. No matter what, we all agreed we’d keep in touch. Vassili even said I could take him to a cricket match.

  As we boarded the ferry I could see Stamati sitting at one of the café tables. Did he know we were leaving? I was sure Stelios must have told him. He was the first Ikarian we had met. It seemed a long time ago.

  We found Julia and Sarah on the upper deck, together with Ilias who had somehow climbed aboard. He’d have to dive into the Aegean, for the ferry had already left the quayside, and he did, in spectacular fashion, before we were out beyond the harbour walls.

  Through a choppy sea of white waves we watched the island of Ikaria gradually disappear from view. Was that Stelios’s boat I could see? Maybe not. I thought about Sister Ulita and what she might be doing. Did Jim milk the goats this morning? I put my arms round Ros, and said, ‘Another episode of our lives behind us, another one about to begin.’

  We were going home. Going home to what, I thought, and where is home exactly? We didn’t have one. Already I was beginning to look forward to a new beginning.

  ‘Nick, I think I’m pregnant.’

  I didn’t know what to say, so made light of it. ‘Jim’s grandmother’s bed has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘Dad,’ said Sam, with that expression that told me something deep was coming. ‘I don’t know why I want to do it, but I have to.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  He opened his hand and showed me one of the empty cartridge cases he had found left behind by the Ikarian army at Lefkada.

  ‘Why are you showing it to me?’ I asked.

  ‘I want to throw it into the Aegean.’

  ‘Go on then, throw it overboard.’

  He did, and we barely saw a splash, but for Sam it was as if this act carried some magical significance. Maybe he thought he was leaving something behind that would remain for ever.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone, Dad. It’s our secret.’

  Epilogue

  In 2016, Arabella (Sarah) and I returned to Ikaria, thirty-nine years after we had lived on the island. Many twists and turns later, and twenty-five years after we’d met, Arabella and I had married. We’d often thought about going back, knowing it couldn’t possibly be the same. How the inevitable changes might well be terribly disappointing and we would wish we’d never gone. You can’t return to your past, capture again what a place meant to you, how you were feeling then. Everything moves on, even Ikaria.

  It now has an airport, a modest set-up, carved between two hills on the northern point of the island. We flew in on an Olympic Airways flight from Athens that took under an hour, not the eight it takes from Piraeus on the ferry. On the plane, two Ikarian women beside us were nervous. When I asked why, they said it was the wind. Sometimes it isn’t safe for the planes to land. ‘They shouldn’t have built it here, at the end of a natural wind tunnel between the hills.’

  Our hire car, a little red Peugeot 305, was covered in small dents and scratches, and when I pointed them out to the girl she said ‘Nem pirasi’ and told us the engine was good. The clock showed 120,000 kilometres.

  We had decided to stay in Armenistis, on the north side of the island, partly because in 1977 we had lived on the south. We thought that if it had changed dramatically we could retreat north and not go back. The best beaches are here and so is most of the development for tourism, but thankfully there are no high-rise buildings and the landscape is as we remembered it.

  After a few days, we headed south to find the past.

  It was an hour and a half’s drive to Aghios Kirikos and we had to cross the backbone of the island. Out there in the wild hardly anything had changed. There were very few new houses, and it had the look of Ikaria as it was in the 1970s. One thing was noticeable: the increase in the number of cars, which the Ikarians drove into the ground and left to rust on the roadside, along with fire engines and trucks. There is no facility on the island to dispose of old cars, though apparently every few years they are collected and taken by boat to Piraeus to be crushed; but this costs money that Greece certainly doesn’t have.

  Aghios Kirikos didn’t seem to have grown dramatically. All the sycamore trees in front of the tavernas and cafés around the harbour had gone, replaced by masses of tables under pergolas. Although the protected harbour was bigger, there were fewer fishing boats now, maybe half a dozen. I couldn’t pick out Stelios’s boat, but after all these years he would probably have replaced it, if he was still fishing.

  We wer
en’t able to track down Datsun Jim, finding out eventually that he had gone to live with his brother in America. That would have been something, to have met him again. As for Stamati, he no longer ran his restaurant, but still lived in Aghios Kirikos.

  Stelios is a big personality and the owner of the first café we went to knew him well and phoned him. Twenty minutes later he appeared, in jeans and a T-shirt. The walk had changed, the thick hair was greying, with each step he swayed, but it was Stelios all right, lighting a cigarette, still smoking Karelias.

  We didn’t know how to greet each other. I just smiled, and he circled round me, said, ‘Yes, it is you,’ and finally we embraced. Then we sat and talked for two hours. I couldn’t believe it when he said he was still living with his wife. ‘We have an arrangement.’ He told me Theo had just married for the fifth time and made his living as a pig farmer.

  He showed me his boat, another one he’d named Panagia, which he’d bought five years ago, and we agreed that before I left we would go fishing again, the two of us out in the Aegean. I sang ‘Pende pano, pende cato’ as we walked back along the quayside, both of us laughing.

  Stelios rang Ilias and within the space of a couple of hours we had our second reunion. The Pharaoh, now greying and bearded, walked with a stick, still recovering from a motorbike accident in 2013. He told us about the fire of 1993 that had swept through a good part of the island, including Lefkada. Maria and Yannis, of course, had died years ago.

  I asked him about the Toula Hotel; it had closed down three years after opening, Petros having left the island heavily in debt. Apparently it was still up for sale if anyone wanted to buy it.

  We drove out of Aghios Kirikos, the road tarmacked now, and could see the shell of the building through bolted wire gates.

  And then there we were, back at Lefkada. Where all the tables and chairs had been was now overgrown with dry grass. The green door and shutters on the building at the top of the steps were locked, just visible through overgrown bushes. Maria’s little kitchen was derelict, full of leaves, the whitewashed walls faded. I stood exactly where the telephone had been, the cable hanging from the wall, its wires exposed. The eucalyptus trees were still there, much bigger, as majestic as ever, and the cicadas too, high-pitched and filling our ears.