Chapter Fifty-Eight
Fifty-eight
Katerina knew only darkness.
The pale light that streamed in through the windows of the house each morning mocked her with its optimism. A dawn that had once felt so promising was now a cruel reminder of all she had lost. She pulled the blankets over her head, closing her eyes to it.
Dafni came, as she had taken to doing, her tread soft across the cracked boards. Each day, she would bring a morsel to tempt Katerina—dried fish she had traded for in the village, root mash with a little oil, a thin broth with lentil sediment. Today it was a single boiled egg.
“You must eat,” she said. “For the baby.”
Katerina took the dish from her. There was no salt or bread, but the egg was fresh, its yolk the melting yellow of the sinking sun.
“You will want to know how I got it,” Dafni said proudly. “I heard about a woman in Chora who has been permitted to keep chickens. Most of the eggs go to the soldiers, but she manages to hide a few each week and will let them go for a price.”
She waited for Katerina to ask what price, frowning slightly when she did not.
“It is different for each person. There is a rumor that one of the rich landowners gave her two donkeys for two eggs—can you believe it?”
Katerina could believe it. She was taking only the smallest bites, wanting to savor it, hating how ardently her body demanded the food. Why should she eat when Leni had not?
“For me, she asked only my name and who the eggs were for,” Dafni continued. “I tried to pay her, said that I could clean for her, perhaps tend to her animals”—she chuckled to herself—“but she would not hear of it.”
Katerina chewed slowly.
“The rain is having a day of rest,” Dafni said, looking back toward the door. “I thought that I might go down to the beach, try to find an urchin for supper. It is too cold for the Italians—they do not walk down to the water, and I prefer to be away from their scrutiny.”
The shell of the egg was empty, every piece of the white scraped away. Katerina passed her empty dish and spoon back to the older woman and lay down.
“You should try to get outside, agápi mou,” Dafni said softly, putting a hand on her arm. “There is still life for you to live, a life growing inside that is going to need you very soon.”
A hot spike of anger speared through Katerina. Life without her sister was no life at all.
She must have slept, for when she next opened her eyes, the room was frigid, the fire in the grate long ago burned out. Wood had become scarce on the island, and they had taken to burning clods of earth, the thick smoke coating the walls with dirt.
Katerina swung her feet to the floor and stood.
Every movement was difficult, her belly protruding from her body like a ripe grape.
The baby had been quiet, sleeping when she slept, docile since the death of his or her aunt.
That Leni would never get to meet the child was an unfairness that had ripped away the final vestiges of Katerina’s faith.
What kind of god punished a soul as sweet as her sister’s?
In the days following the meager funeral, she had sat and read each of the letters Leni had written to Michalis, full of false cheer and anodyne tales, and then she had burned them.
If he ever came back, she planned to tell him the truth of what had befallen them, the horror he and Stefanos had walked away from when they’d chosen to rejoin the fight.
Dafni was not in the house nor the yard.
The clock on the wall of her bedroom told her it was nearing four thirty p.m.—the sun would set within the hour.
Katerina was struck by a sudden urge to see it, to sit as she once had on the hillside in the days before the occupation. Before love. Before tragedy.
Wrapped in two shawls, with her boots laced tight, she raised the latch and stepped out into the cold afternoon air, pausing for a moment at the grave she had made for Chrysí.
Her beloved goat. The first casualty of a war that was determined to take away everything she loved.
Katerina used the wall to steady herself, stared up through the bare branches of the overhanging tree toward a sky the gray of a young gull’s feathers.
Walking hurt, but she had come this far, so she pressed on, ignoring the low pulls of pain across her back, the cramps that squeezed bile into her throat.
The ridge was ahead, though she could no longer go to that spot.
Lio’s face was a frequent visitor, coming to her in the blurred world between wakefulness and slumber, eyes wide and mouth agape.
His death had shocked both of them, and though the rain of that night had washed away any trace of blood, Katerina feared his ghost would be standing guard where his body had fallen. Waiting for her, as he had in life.
She stopped as a ripple of discomfort traveled through her. A new pain, as if someone were pulling her insides together. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, her skin damp despite the chill.
It had been a mistake to climb up here; she should never have strayed so far from the house.
Katerina gave in to a sob, stumbling on legs that felt weak as matchsticks.
Her hair fell in tangles over her eyes. Pebbles tumbled away.
The path was slick, the light fast fading.
Below her, the village came into view, her relief tainted by agony as a violent cramp took hold.
She clutched her stomach, cried out as a gush of liquid flooded the inside of her legs.
The baby was coming.
She fell to her knees and crawled toward the closest house.
Not her own, Dafni’s. In her delirious state, she had forgotten that her friend no longer lived there, had not lived there for many months.
If she could only reach the door, find the strength to bang against it—but then the burning came again.
Katerina could no longer move or breathe or think coherently.
Warm light fell across her. A voice, gentle but firm.
Hands moving, examining. Words she did not recognize spoken with hushed urgency.
Katerina was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been, and though the woman looking down at her did so with kindness, she shut her eyes.
And did not open them again. Not during the pain or the agony, not when she was tearing, ripping, screaming.
Not afterward, when all was quiet and the darkness she craved came again to steal her away.
She dreamed of Stefanos. His hand in hers. Laughter on his lips. Light in his eyes. They were on an island. Not Folegandros but another, smaller, cut off from the rest of the world. The sun warm against their skin as they lay together, side by side, on a beach of sugary sand.
It was all she wanted, but there was something wrong. Something missing.
Katerina sat and stared out across the water. It was not blue but black. A great swirling beast rising nearer and nearer until—
She awoke thrashing, kicking, a rasping cry scouring her throat.
Dafni appeared in an instant. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled Katerina against her, holding her tight, rocking her back and forth.
“Wh-Where is she?” Katerina stuttered. “Where is my daughter?”
Dafni did not reply. She loosened her grip, shook her head.
“What have you done with her?”
“I am sorry, agápi mou.” Dafni began to cry. Her face crumpled like paper in the rain. “Ingrid, she did everything she could. The baby came the wrong way. The cord was around her neck. I am sorry,” she said again.
What use was sorry? What good could sorry do?
The door to the room creaked open. Ingrid emerged, a bottle in her hand. Her face was flushed, blotched with tears. The dress she wore stained in blood.
“Koniák,” she said, unscrewing the lid.
“Drink it,” Dafni urged. “It will help with the pain, the shock.”
Katerina was too numb to refuse. The brandy tasted sweet. She took another sip, then another. She drank until the room turned to water, until the horror of her reality had been erased. She craved only oblivion.
The days passed.
Sun rose, darkness fell.
Somehow her heart continued to beat.
Ingrid and Dafni stayed close. She was never alone.
Even when she stepped outside to relieve herself, their boots waited just beyond the wooden door, standing guard, watching, caring.
In the quiet hours, the German nurse read thick novels, slowly working through Greek words.
Dafni, endlessly patient, offered gentle corrections with a smile.
Katerina was in the room but not truly present. The world felt distant, muffled, as if she were watching through the wrong end of a telescope. She was a ghost in her own skin, untethered from life.
It was several weeks before she ventured back to the place where her daughter was buried. Not in the church grounds or the cemetery in Chora but with Chrysí. Katerina had been adamant.
“We will have a proper funeral when her father returns,” she said in answer to Dafni’s timid argument. “I am the only home she ever knew. She belongs close to me.”
Phaedra and Esther had stood alongside them at the small grave on that bleak morning, heads bowed, faces set. Katerina had already weighed them down with one secret. Now she had burdened them with another.
When February arrived, it did so with news.
The British had listened to the plea of the Greeks and would allow humanitarian aid to pass the blockade.
At last, food would come. Too late to save the hundreds who had perished on Folegandros, the rumored tens of thousands who’d starved on the mainland.
Too late to save her sister. Katerina yearned for her baby, yet Leni’s absence was the boot on her throat.
She no longer feared the enemy, not their guns or bombs. It was sorrow that terrified her, grief a parasite that was consuming her from the inside out.
“I must leave this place,” she said.
Dafni and Ingrid turned abruptly to face her. They were sitting as they often did in the garden of Katerina’s home, a pot of herbal tea curling steam into the still air. It was March, yet spring was nowhere to be found. Winter had become an enemy, holding hostage the season of hope.
“What are you talking about?” Dafni replied. “Leave and go where?”
“To the mainland.”
Ingrid lowered her cup.
“éla, you cannot,” Dafni chided. “It is forbidden.”
“Let them shoot me,” Katerina said. “I do not care.”
“That is exactly what they would do,” Dafni said. “But they would rape you first. Beat you. Make an example of you.”
Katerina raised her eyes to the muted sky.
“There is nothing here for me,” she said quietly. “My parents are gone, my sister is dead, my child is dead, my heart—” Her voice snagged on the word. “My heart has turned to ash. If I stay here, I will die.”
“No.” Dafni reached across and took her hand. “You will not die, Kat. You will live.”
“I need to see him,” she said firmly. “I must find Stefanos. I must tell him about— He is the only one who can save me. The only person I have left.”
“You have us,” Dafni said urgently. “You have Ingrid, Phaedra, Es—Kostas. Your parents will return when the war is over, and—”
“They are gone,” Katerina said. “I can feel it.”
“Even if you could escape this island, you do not know where to find Stefanos. He could have been captured or be hiding or even killed.”
“He is alive.” Katerina met her gaze. “If he had died, I would have died with him. No. He is alive, and I will find him. No matter what it takes.”
Ingrid stood to refill their cups.
“Your husband,” she said. “He is a soldier?”
“He fights for freedom,” Katerina said, puffing out her chest. “For Greece.”
Ingrid nodded.
“It is probable that he will be on the mainland,” she said, stumbling slightly over the words.
“The mainland!” Dafni cried. “There is no way to reach it. You must forget this nonsense.”
But Katerina was looking only at Ingrid. She saw how the woman’s focus had drifted, her ice-blue eyes locking on to an unseeable future.
“I can help you,” she said.
A surge of heat flooded through Katerina.
“What do you mean?”
Ingrid sat down, folding her hands in her lap.
“My husband has sent for me,” she said.
Katerina could not be sure, but it looked as if the woman shuddered as she spoke.
“He is in Athens and will remain there for some time. I have been instructed to prepare for a boat that will leave in two days’ time. If I tell the soldiers that you have become my nursemaid, they will not question it. The general’s rule is absolute, and I am his wife.”
“You would do that?” Katerina said breathlessly. “For me?”
Ingrid faced her.
“You love this man Stefanos?”
Katerina smiled. It was the first time she had since Leni’s death.
“As the clouds love the sky,” she said softly. “As the trees love the sun, the waves love the shore, the night loves the stars.”
“Then you must find him,” Ingrid said.
Katerina fell to her knees, seized the woman’s hands, and pressed her lips to her fingers.
“You mean it? I can come with you?”
Ingrid rose slowly, drawing Katerina up until their eyes met. Two women, face-to-face.
Equals.
Friends.
Survivors.
“Yes,” she said. “I mean it.”