One August Night Page 7

  CRETE: JOYFUL HOMECOMING

  MARRED BY MURDER.

  It could only be referring to the release of patients from Spinalonga, a happy moment overshadowed by a killing. A woman shot at point-blank range was identified by witnesses as Anna Vandoulakis. Seeing his lover’s name in black and white gave him a huge jolt, as if an electrical current had passed through him. Vandoulakis was his name too. He felt more strongly connected with her than ever before. Anna had been his. His sense of this was as strong as ever. He was both possessor and possessed.

  The author of the piece could not have known how the cure for leprosy and such a killing were somehow connected, and sketchily described the sequence of that night’s events. The cure of the patients on Spinalonga and the historic moment of their leaving had been overshadowed by a crime passionnel. That was all he had understood.

  Andreas’s name was mentioned several times, along with the details of his arrest and the scheduled date for the trial. The journalist had done little work to dig into the story. There was no connection made between the victim and the patients. From Manolis’s point of view, this was no bad thing.

  What he hated most was the way in which Anna was described: ‘a fisherman’s daughter elevated by marriage into a landowning family’. It was true, but demeaning, as the author of the piece would well have known.

  Only one member of the Vandoulakis family had come forward to comment. Andreas’s sister Olga had spoken at length to the journalist:

  ‘Our name has been sullied by this. My sister-in-law did not fit into the family. Let’s say she was not really born to live in such a way and it is not always for the best when someone marries into a different kind of family from their own. All I will say is that Anna was coquettish and rather spoilt. And she was a negligent mother, too. I won’t say more than that. We can’t speculate on the reason for this event, but all we know is that this woman provoked my brother to commit an act of homicide. Andreas is a kind and gentle man. One day we hope to find out why he did this, but meanwhile we will continue to regard what he did as completely justifiable.’

  Manolis read the article twice, his stomach churning with hatred for his cousin. How dare she imply that Anna was the guilty party? May she go to hell!

  He left the kafeneío, shoved the paper into the nearest bin and strode towards the sea.

  It was only a paragraph in a newspaper, but reading it had had a decisive effect on Manolis. Any residual delusion he held onto that Anna had not actually died was gone. The words on the page were definitive proof.

  He had spent enough time alone and his roll of notes was shrinking rapidly. It had seemed plenty to start with, but with rent and food he was almost through it. He needed to find a job.

  Piraeus had gradually recovered from the devastation caused during the Second World War. The bombing of the huge dock area and the destruction of buildings and ships had been extensive, but now that repairs had been completed, Greek shipping was thriving. Sunken ships had rapidly been replaced and the Greek-owned fleet now surpassed even the British and American in size. Many of the shipping companies had offices in Piraeus, and as the world economy boomed, so did the port.

  There was work for anyone who wanted it, in repairs, in loading freight, on the ferries, in construction. Finding the manpower was the hardest part.

  That evening, Manolis found himself in a kafeneío where a group of men sat together at the next table and cheerfully clinked shots of ouzo. One of them raised a glass in his direction. It was a gesture of friendliness towards a stranger; in Piraeus, lifelong residents happily intermingled with newcomers. There was no suspicion towards an outsider in this town. Everyone was welcomed into the melting pot of the ancient port.

  Manolis fell into conversation with the men, and one of them introduced himself as Giannis, the foreman of a repair yard. Manolis had been conscious even before they spoke that the man had been scrutinising him. He had sized up Manolis’s strong physique and wrinkled complexion and surmised that he was a man not unused to manual labour. He knew nothing about Manolis personally, but he never took on men with pale skin and soft hands. They always proved workshy in the end.

  At the end of the evening, Giannis scribbled down an address and told Manolis to come and see him any time he wanted work. He was convinced that this powerful-looking Cretan would be a useful labourer.

  The following Monday morning, after his first decent night’s sleep since arriving on the mainland, Manolis got up feeling refreshed. The morning was warm but the heatwave of August had given way to the gentler temperatures of September, hot in the day but with bearable nights.

  He went out into the early-morning sunshine, stopping at the barber to have his hair trimmed and his moustache clipped, and then took the short walk towards the shipyards. Dipping into his pocket for the scrap of paper on which the address was written, he knew immediately when he had reached his destination.

  PENELOPE. With her name painted large on her bow, she was hard to miss. Her giant hull loomed over the yard, casting everything around it into shadow.

  Scores of men were already at work, small figures pushing loaded carts of materials, or suspended in harnesses that dangled them from a great height on the ship’s massive dark body. Manolis thought of the ants that hurried in and out of the anthills in the Elounda countryside, each of them purposeful, scurrying to achieve a task without being aware of the scale of the whole.

  It was not even eight in the morning, but three or four other men were already gathered outside the wooden hut serving as an office. They were all looking for work. From his desk inside, Giannis, who coordinated repairs, looked up, recognised Manolis and called him inside.

  The foreman had taken to Manolis. He had uncles from Crete and knew that he and this newcomer would find common ground. His team had a lot to accomplish before Penelope was due to sail again in six months’ time, and he could do with such a type.

  ‘It’s fifteen hundred drachma a week, seven until four. One hour’s rest at midday. Five and a half days a week. We are stripping the hull of an eighty-metre ship and I have another team waiting to paint it. There’s a bonus if we finish on time, a bigger one if we get things done earlier than that. It’s gruelling work.’

  ‘Probably no tougher than working in the fields,’ Manolis assured him.

  ‘Maybe even less so because you’ll be working in the shade half the day.’

  The two men shook hands. Manolis was keen to get going. It would take his mind off the all-consuming thoughts of Anna and the newspaper article. His rage towards Olga Vandoulakis still burned inside him.

  ‘I need you on the port side,’ said Giannis briskly. ‘We had some slackers there. I fired them last week, but we’re behind.’

  Telling the men outside that they would have to wait, Giannis took Manolis across the yard to meet his new colleagues.

  ‘Dimitris,’ he said to the head of the team. ‘You have a new man. A good man. I’ll leave you to it.’

  Just before he turned to walk away, he pulled something out of his pocket.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing Manolis a checked kerchief. ‘You’ll need this.’

  ‘If you don’t wear one,’ said Dimitris, ‘you won’t last long!’

  Manolis looked upwards at the great hull. High above, he could see that all the men on the scaffold had their faces wrapped to protect them from dust.

  ‘So, these are your tools,’ said Dimitris briskly, giving him a heavy scraper, a large soft brush and a blowtorch.

  Manolis had never held a blowtorch before and was surprised by its weight. Dimitris demonstrated how it worked and Manolis stood back to avoid the flame, which shot out with alarming force. Having tried it once himself and been shown the angle at which to hold the scraper, he was considered ready to start.

  He tucked the brush and scraper into his belt and climbed the fifteen metres to the platform, one hand grasping the ladder, the other clutching the cumbersome torch. When he got there, he took a space betwee
n two other men. They paused briefly and nodded a greeting. Perhaps they were the men from the bar the other night. It was impossible to tell.

  Observing his neighbours for a moment as they worked, he saw for how long he needed to use the flame, how to loosen the paint without damaging the fabric of the hull and how much time to spend cleaning away the dust.

  He tied the cotton square around his mouth and nose and started work. After a while, he had found his rhythm: flame, scrape, brush. Flame, scrape, brush. Flame, scrape, brush.

  At the end where Manolis was working, only around a fifth had been done. He did not like to imagine how many days were left. He thought of a patch of land up on the Lassithi plateau that his uncle had once asked him to clear in a short time. Thirty hectares needed to be weeded and tilled before seeding could happen. The stony ground had been stubborn; after a whole day he had moved forward only a metre or two, and the area left to clear stretched ahead like a curse. This ship was similarly daunting, but what he had learned back in Elounda was that if you started and kept going, the task grew smaller.

  The hours passed slowly. The constant noise of scraping and the fact that their mouths were masked precluded any conversation. With the sun beating down on his head and the sweat pouring down his back, he imagined with every scrape of his chisel that he was paying a penance for Anna’s death. Without him, Anna could have continued to be a good wife. If he had not returned from his travels, if he had not looked so like Andreas, if, if, if . . . Perhaps he was responsible and the one who should be put on trial.

  As the temperature rose, his feelings of guilt became heavier. The work kept his hands busy but gave him many hours to think. More than he needed, perhaps. The fields of Elounda had been a test of endurance, but the dark space on which Manolis worked now was even harder and less forgiving than the dry Cretan soil.

  ‘Manolis! Hey! Manolis!’

  He did not know how long Dimitris had been calling him. When he looked around, he saw that all the other men had descended the ladder, leaving their torches behind, and were on the ground below. He had been lost in his own world, mechanically scraping but hearing nothing.

  Storing his tools in his pocket, he quickly climbed down.

  ‘Good work this morning,’ Dimitris said to the group. ‘See you back here in an hour.’

  The others sauntered off together and Manolis stood alone. He had no appetite and did not follow. All he wanted was to quench his thirst. A cart was going by selling cold soda, and he bought a bottle before seeking shade close to some cargo containers and sitting down. A bale of cotton had been abandoned close by, and he leant his back against it. Before long, his head lolled forward and he fell asleep. In his dream, Anna came strolling by, her hair loose, her dark curls cascading down her back, her bottom swaying provocatively as she passed.

  At one o’clock precisely, the team came back. Manolis was woken by the touch of Dimitris’s boot on his.

  ‘How are you finding it?’ Dimitris asked as Manolis sat up, blinking into the sunlight.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s good,’ he said, for want of anything else.

  The work continued, and by the end of the afternoon, Manolis had cleared enough of a patch to justify being there. They were on a rolling scaffold, so they all needed to finish their allocated area at the same time in order to move the structure on. This was individual effort but the work of a team, and the task that still faced them was Herculean.

  Manolis found the week went by swiftly, each day the same as the first and progressively more exhausting.

  On Saturday afternoon, he began the stroll back home, contemplating how much he was looking forward to his day off. The air was still warm, but a cooling breeze was beginning to come off the sea. He spotted Giannis walking a few steps ahead and caught up with him. The two men exchanged information about where they lived, and Manolis discovered that the foreman lodged with his aunt in a street adjacent to Agathi’s.

  ‘Do you want to hear some music tonight?’ suggested Giannis. A legendary rebétiko singer was billed to be playing in a nearby taverna.

  ‘I’ll see you later, then,’ said Manolis when they reached the end of his street. The two men went their separate ways.

  Manolis counted out what he owed Agathi and slid the notes under her door. Only then did he shower. His hair was stiff with dust, and as he had done each day since he began the job, he stood under the flow for more than twenty minutes watching the dirt run down the plughole, then tilted his face up and felt his eyes and nose fill with water. It was the only way to get rid of the grit. Eventually, once he had scrubbed his body several times with soap, he stepped out and dried himself.

  Using the small, cracked mirror above the sink, he began to shave. It was almost dark in the bathroom, and it was only when he had finished that he realised he had nicked himself. A track of blood had run down his chin and woven a path towards his heart. The sight took his mind to the place it always returned to. Anna. He tried not to think about her wound, preferring to remember her perfection, but wondered precisely where the bullet had entered.

  He slept for a while and then left for his rendezvous. Giannis’s paréa mostly comprised other rootless men who had come to Piraeus to find work. Manolis had already met Dimitris, Aris, Mihalis, Petros, Tasos, Stavros and Miltos at the shipyard, but this was the first time he had seen their faces properly. No doubt each had a story to tell, but Manolis did not ask any questions, since he was not planning to answer any himself.

  They ate, drank and sang along with the row of tireless, note-perfect bouzoúki players, who strummed as one. The place was noisy, so it was no place for intimate conversation, and as the night progressed, the sound level only rose as singer after singer appeared to deliver their repertoire.

  A few girls sat on the periphery of the room. Occasionally one of them approached their table, and some of the men in the group engaged her in conversation. Manolis already knew that the women in Piraeus were very different from those in Crete. These girls dressed unselfconsciously and brightly, unafraid to show cleavage, legs and arms. Many had their hair cut in shorter styles; their nails were scarlet and their jewellery garish. They wore stiletto heels.

  He had travelled little more than three hundred kilometres, but conservative Cretan society seemed as far away as the moon. The women here reminded him of those he had met in Paris and Madrid, but even more free and liberated. If one of them tried to speak to him, however, a subtle lift of his head simply indicated ‘no’ and allowed little room for further engagement. Manolis was not drawn to any of them. He had no desire for female company. There was only one woman on his mind. Anna still filled his thoughts.

  On that evening in Piraeus, as often happened late in an evening, Manolis suddenly caught the opening notes of a zeibékiko song and felt something inside him stir. The lyrics of this particular song seemed to mirror his life, jabbing at his heart. As if possessed by the power of the music, he rose from his seat.

  In the night I reach for you,

  But in my arms I feel a void.

  I dread those deepest, darkest dreams . . .

  His friends immediately dragged their glass-laden tables out of his way to give him space to begin the slow solo dance. With several carafes of ouzo inside him and grief weighing on him like a boulder, he stretched his arms out like an eagle and began to turn. The movements were personal but the tradition of the zeibékiko was known to everyone. It was a dance that should only be performed by a man, and only by a man with grief to express.

  As the musicians played and the insistent beat thumped and repeated and thumped again, Manolis revolved slowly in a trance-like state, his eyes glazed, unfocused. Someone threw a plate at his feet and one of the girls tossed a flower that she had been wearing in her hair. He was aware of neither. Giannis, Dimitris and several others knelt down, as if in worship, and clapped their hands in time with the distinctive 9/8 rhythm.

  The image of you next to me.

  All dressed in white, a beam of l
ight,

  I wake to see the empty sheets and die.

  The dance gave him the opportunity to reveal the darkest corners of his soul. The movements were restrained, tense, controlled, and yet they opened a window into his heart for anyone who looked and cared to understand. All eyes were on him, willing him on. Still turning with arms outstretched, he folded forwards and then bent back in a limbo. The sight of this tall and strikingly beautiful man performing something almost acrobatic held the attention of everyone in the room.

  With each turn, he expressed the agony he felt: for the woman he loved, for the tragedy of her death, for his wretched cousin languishing in a prison cell, for his uncle and aunt lamenting the fate of their only son, for Sofia, who had lost both mother and father, for Giorgos, who mourned his daughter, and for Maria, who would be weeping over her sister.

  Everyone watched, mesmerised. This was not a man putting on a display of machismo for the crowd; it was a human being exposing every atom of pain that he was feeling.

  The dance was a ritual. It was purifying, a catharsis. The relief, however, did not last. Within a few minutes of sitting down again, Manolis was conscious that his pain was still there inside him.

  Giannis clapped his friend on the shoulder in a gesture of wordless sympathy. He poured himself and Manolis another glass of ouzo, which they downed in one.

  Manolis remembered how he had danced the zeibékiko at Sofia’s baptism, recalling the whistles of approval as the men gathered in a circle around him and the moment when he caught sight of Anna gazing at him in adulation. Her admiration had been the greatest prize of all. He had been misusing this majestic dance to show off, even then knowing it was wrong to do so. Tonight he had not danced the zeibékiko; the zeibékiko had seized him and made him dance.