One evening, planning just to stay for a short time, he called in for a cold beer. The previous night he had been playing until dawn and had gone straight to the fields without sleep. Normally he knew everyone in the kafeneío, but tonight there was a pair of unfamiliar faces. Two men, clearly friends, sat together in the corner. It was unusual in such a small place for strangers not to be integrated into the general conversation, but these men did not seem uncomfortable with being ostracised. They had chosen to sit in the shadows.
Grigoris, the kafetzís, approached Manolis with his beer and put it down. Even though Manolis had his back to the strangers, Grigoris knew his customer well enough to interpret his glance.
‘They were let out early,’ he said, under his breath.
The phrase immediately made Manolis think of prison.
‘They took the medicine before the others,’ continued Grigoris. ‘They’re cured.’
The men overheard, and one of them quietly got up and approached Manolis. His proximity was not intended to be threatening, but Manolis found himself momentarily afraid of the presence looming over him. He sprang to his feet and turned around to face him.
‘Vandoulakis!’ said the man.
The voice seemed familiar to Manolis, but nothing much else did. It was an involuntary reaction, but he stepped back, unable to conceal his revulsion.
‘Panagiotis Apostolakis.’
Getting little more than a blank look from his old acquaintance, Panagiotis Apostolakis repeated himself.
Manolis now recalled that someone with the name Apostolakis used to own a taverna in Elounda. He had been there many times.
The man was holding out his hand, and Manolis saw that it lacked several fingers. He had not anticipated that he would feel so repelled. He thrust his own hands into his trouser pockets and took another step back.
Though his thick stature was unchanged, Panagiotis Apostolakis was facially unrecognisable. He had been a handsome man with a moustache that had impressed even Manolis. Now he was bald, with not a single hair on his head or his face.
Manolis looked over Apostolakis’s shoulder and caught sight of his companion. The other man was more seriously disfigured, his face deeply scarred, his ears distended. From his vacant stare, Manolis deduced that he was also blind.
He tried to overcome his revulsion but failed to reach out. Apostolakis had dropped his hand to his side now in any case.
‘So . . .’ was all Manolis could manage to say. Words dried in his mouth.
‘We’re the first to be . . .’
Grigoris passed them on his way to serve another table.
‘They’re the first to have tried the drugs!’ said the kafetzís with enthusiasm. ‘Almost the first to come home!’
Manolis managed a smile.
‘Yes. It’s great news!’ he said unconvincingly, reaching for the dregs of his beer that still sat on the table.
He drained the glass and left hastily.
As he climbed into his truck, he found his hands shaking so much that he struggled to put the key in the ignition. As the engine eventually fired into life, he caught sight of Giorgos in the distance. He swung the truck round to avoid having to pass him and roared off.
As he drove, he asked himself the same questions, over and over again. Would Maria look like that now? Would she be without a nose? Without hands? Without hair? He struggled in vain to stop his mind from imagining her this way.
The following day, knowing that Andreas was in Iraklion, he paid Anna a surprise visit. For the first hour or so, she sustained a furious sulk with him for having neglected her for so many days. They sat opposite one another in the drawing room and she would not look him in the eye.
‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he pleaded.
He got up and went over to her, kneeling at her feet like a supplicant and taking her hand. She snatched it back immediately.
‘You know how much I love you,’ he persisted.
She said nothing for a moment, and then a playful smile crept across her lips.
‘You’ll have to prove it,’ she said coquettishly.
Sofia had been taken out by the nursemaid, so for the next hour at least they knew that the house was theirs.
Even with the windows wide open, they did not hear the sound of Andreas’s car arriving and then leaving again.
Anna was happy and chatty that evening over dinner. Andreas, on the other hand, snapped at everything she said.
‘Why are you being so disagreeable?’ she asked.
Sofia came into the room just as they were finishing dessert and ran towards her father, expecting to be lifted onto his lap. She was finding it difficult to sleep during these hot nights, and often came downstairs while her parents were eating.
‘Go back to bed!’ snapped Andreas, pushing the child away. ‘Now!’
‘Babá!’ Sofia cried out, dropping to the floor. ‘Babáaaaaa!’ Anguished by the rebuff, she began to wail.
‘Andreas!’ exclaimed Anna. ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’
She picked Sofia up and cuddled her, but the child was inconsolable, and the sound of her sobs filled the house.
Andreas left the room and slammed the door behind him. It took another few hours before Sofia calmed down, and that night she slept in her mother’s bed. Andreas had gone to sleep in another room at the far end of the house.
For the rest of that week, he was mostly absent from the house, and on the estate he was particularly bad-tempered with the workers. Manolis had several encounters with him when he was castigated for not meeting targets and for not tending some of the olive groves diligently enough, and he was stung by the harshness of his cousin’s criticisms. Clearly he should keep out of his way for a while, but the reason for this change in attitude preyed on his mind.
Andreas’s rudeness, combined with the lurking unease over Maria’s return, made Manolis unusually withdrawn. All the workers on the estate noticed it and teased him. In spite of his kinship with the boss, he had always been considered one of them.
‘Not coming out with us, Manolis?’ Antonis asked towards the end of the afternoon.
‘He’s quenching his thirst elsewhere!’ joshed one of the men.
‘Aah . . . a woman,’ said another man under his breath.
‘Love . . . he’s in love,’ whispered yet another.
Manolis’s silence was not denial. Of course he was in love, but even Antonis, who was closer to him than anyone, did not know the identity of the woman. Years back, rumours of a liaison with Anna had been rife, but if they had ever been true in the first place, Antonis imagined the relationship must now be a thing of the past.
They all thought they knew Manolis. Most Saturday evenings he would join friends and fellow workers in Elounda, where there were more than a dozen bars and as many tavernas. It was a sprawling fishing village and a very lively place to pass the time, and Manolis flirted with the local girls as enthusiastically as the rest.
The Manolis they saw today was not the one they recognised. It was not the Manolis who shared their happy banter, and they all knew to leave him alone.
He turned his back on them and continued banging in a new fence post, applying more force than needed. The others carried on with their labours.
During recent days, it had been impossible to avoid hearing the words ‘lepers’, ‘cure’, ‘drugs’, ‘Spinalonga’ endlessly repeated. They filled the summer air as densely as the honey bees. The final plans for the evacuation of the island were unrolling, and in the towns and villages of Lassithi there was talk of little else.