Chapter 15
Work went on the following day much as it had the day before, but this time, Cleo stayed close to the camp, helping to rebuild Villa Ariadne.
The sun was low when she paused for a break, and a late-afternoon light gilded the villa’s shattered rooftops and the olive and lemon trees that still leaned drunkenly from the storm.
The air was heavy with damp earth and salt, but a fragile peace had settled over the area. Birds had returned, hesitantly at first, and now their song seemed to filter through the ancient villa’s shattered windows and echo down its corridors and round its walls.
It seemed, to Cleo, that the place was beginning to wake from a long sleep, its beams, floorboards, pillars and rafters slowly regaining consciousness, spurred on by the cheerful shouts, singing and activity of the workers.
Planning to have a short break and some coffee, she started to walk down the hallway, picking her way carefully past broken tiles and upended buckets. There was the constant sound of hammering above, as men repaired the roof.
Just beyond the open front door, she spotted Katerina, bent double over a patch of collapsed stone beneath the porch. The old woman was insisting on doing things herself, despite everyone’s protests.
‘I’m not dead yet,’ she’d told Cleo that morning, her black eyes glinting fiercely in her small, wrinkled face.
Cleo had been worried; she could see the exhaustion in Katerina and the tremor in her hands, but didn’t dare push further for fear of having her head snapped off.
Now, as she approached, she saw Katerina reach too far forward and try to lift a chunk of rock. There was a sudden cry, a sharp thud, then silence.
‘Katerina!’
Cleo raced towards her as fast as she could and knelt beside her while she checked her pulse. Her breath was coming in shallow, rasping gasps. Her head had struck stone and a thin trickle of blood darkened her temple.
‘Help!’ Cleo called, but no one could hear over the noise of the building work.
Momentary panic flared in her chest until she reminded herself of her training. She could do this. Removing the sweatshirt tied round her waist, she quickly placed it over Katerina’s body, like a blanket, before checking her airways were clear.
Then she applied gentle pressure round the head wound to stop the bleeding while she looked round desperately again for assistance.
She knew only too well that serious head injuries required urgent medical assessment, preferably in hospital.
Katerina groaned. She was still just about conscious, then. While Cleo whispered soothing words, she noticed a very thin, frail, stooping figure with a stick walking towards them as fast as his trembling legs would allow.
Konstantin.
For a moment, Cleo hesitated. Of all the people who could help, he was the last one Katerina would have chosen. As Marina had explained in no uncertain terms, she despised him. She carried the wound of what his father had done like a scar, carved deep into her heart.
Yet now, seeing him approach, fragile yet determined, Marina’s strange words came back to Cleo and she thought she understood something. Perhaps this was the moment neither of the old people had ever expected but both needed.
She rose and stepped aside.
‘Konstantin,’ she said softly to the old man. ‘She’s hurt. Please help her while I go for assistance.’
He knelt with surprising steadiness for someone in their nineties, lowering himself beside Katerina. His gnarled, veiny hands trembled as he brushed away the blood from her temple with the corner of his sleeve.
‘Katerina, it’s me,’ he murmured. ‘Hold on, my dear. You’ve had a tumble but you’re going to be all right.’
Her eyelids fluttered open and confusion clouded her gaze. Then she realised who it was.
‘You,’ she whispered, in a voice full of old pain. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because you fell,’ he said simply. ‘Because you need someone.’
Oddly, they spoke in English. It was almost if they wanted Cleo to understand and bear witness, she thought. She felt strange and ill at ease, caught up in a situation she didn’t fully comprehend but that she knew was important.
Her nurse’s training was telling her to fetch help immediately but something was holding her back and she couldn’t move; she was glued to the spot.
‘I need nothing from you or your family,’ Katerina said now, trying to push Konstantin away, but her arm fell weakly to her side.
He winced, not at the movement but at her words.
‘I know what you think of me, what you’ve always thought.
Perhaps I deserve your anger. But I swear to you, Katerina, my father never meant for your father to die.
He thought… he thought if he told them what he already knew, they might spare the rest of us.
He was a fool, a coward, perhaps, but not a traitor. ’
Her breath caught in her throat. ‘That’s what cowards always say.’
Cleo stood back, silent, her heart thudding. Once again, she told herself she should run for help, but she was frozen to the spot.
Just then, Ingrid appeared behind her, her face sweaty and smeared with dirt.
‘Find a doctor and get an air ambulance – quick,’ Cleo barked.
Ingrid took one look at Katerina, nodded wordlessly – and ran.
Cleo returned to Katerina and Konstantin, who seemed barely to have registered Ingrid, so wrapped up were they in each other’s presence.
The scene unfolding before Cleo’s eyes felt painful, moving and intimate. It was as if history was suddenly condensed into this patch of stony ground and she knew she mustn’t interrupt; this moment belonged to the two old people.
Konstantin bowed his head. ‘After the war, I wanted to tell you but you wouldn’t listen. You walked past me as if I were a ghost. And maybe I was. I’ve lived all these years with your father’s eyes haunting me.
‘He was my friend, Katerina. I was only a boy, but I remember him. He taught me how to make traps for the birds and how to swim in the cove and do somersaults. When they took him, my father wept. You never saw that.’
Katerina’s lips quivered and her eyes filled with tears.
‘He wept, and yet he lived.’
‘And I lived with his shame,’ Konstantin replied. ‘That’s the price I paid. You think I’ve been spared, but I haven’t. I’ve paid every day since. The war took many things, but the worst was the peace and friendship that once existed between neighbours.’
He paused, looking at her with eyes as dark as ink pools.
‘Let’s make it right before it’s too late.’
He lifted her gently, supporting her head against his knee. Cleo was about to protest but closed her mouth quickly. His hand brushed Katerina’s cheek and for the first time, she didn’t try to pull away.
When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper.
‘I hated you, Konstantin. Every time I saw your face, I saw my father, falling to the ground with a bullet in his chest.’
‘And every time I saw you,’ Konstantin replied, ‘I saw what my father’s fear had destroyed.’
Something in her seemed to break then, like an invisible thread, snapping after decades of tension. Her hand, thin and speckled, reached for his.
‘Maybe it’s time to let the dead rest.’
He nodded, with tears running freely down his face. ‘Let them rest, Katerina. Let us rest, too.’
They stayed like that for several more minutes, two old enemies bound by grief, blood and finally, forgiveness, as the sun slid lower, the light turning golden against the villa’s broken walls.
Cleo watched, her throat tight, as Konstantin dabbed Katerina’s wound with his handkerchief, muttering words she couldn’t hear. Then she turned away, sensing something sacred was passing between them, something she no longer had a right to witness or intrude on.
A loud creaking sound coming from within the villa made her start. A gust of wind shaking the scaffolding, perhaps. To Cleo, it sounded like a groan, followed by a sigh, then she could swear she heard a gentle but insistent whispering.
Pricking her ears, she listened closely.
‘You see? Everything happens for a reason,’ the disembodied voice seemed to say. ‘All shall be well.’
She shook her head and the whispering stopped, but she was left with a strange sense that Villa Ariadne had spoken, and a chasm, once as deep as the famous Samaria Gorge, had finally been sealed.
When at last the doctor and ambulance crew arrived with a stretcher, Konstantin refused to leave Katerina’s side. He helped lift her, murmuring encouragement when she winced with pain. She gripped his hand fiercely, as if afraid he might vanish if she let go.
‘I was wrong,’ she whispered, her voice unsteady but clear, ‘to carry hate for so long. It eats you from the inside.’
‘But love can always heal, no matter how deep the hate is or how long it’s been there,’ he replied with a weary smile.
Cleo turned away, blinking back tears. Above them, swallows dipped and turned, tracing fragile arcs through the open sky.
Later, after Katerina had been taken to hospital, Cleo passed by Konstantin’s tent. He was sitting outside the doorway with a blanket over his knees.
‘She’s going to be OK,’ Cleo said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
He didn’t speak, but Cleo met his gaze and he gave a small nod, as if to say thank you for letting me.
Goosebumps ran up Cleo’s arms and down her spine. She was thinking of Marina’s words as they’d walked down the mountain, and of the strange whispering she’d heard earlier.
Two lives twisted by war had finally found peace and somehow, in her own small way, Cleo had helped to bring that about.
Konstantin was still gazing at her, his face a mass of wrinkles but his eyes, sharp and bright. She nodded back at him and gave a small smile, her chest swelling with emotion.
The morning of departure arrived quickly and unceremoniously. Cleo, Tash and Maya packed their few belongings with deliberate slowness, trying to delay the inevitable separation, before heading down the mountain with the other guests from the retreat.