Outside the chapel I took the first tentative step towards our goal. I tried to be casual. ‘They tell me you have a library here?’ I said. ‘Can it be visited?’
‘Who told you that?’ Sister Maria’s response was guarded.
‘Just someone in the town.’
‘What did they tell you?’
‘Oh, nothing specific… I just wondered…’
I suppose that strict honesty is an inviolable requirement of the moral code these ladies observed. After a moment of thought she said, ‘It is rumoured that there were once caves below these buildings. Books might have been stored there. I have never seen them.’
‘Rumoured?’
‘They were already sealed up when I came. That was forty years ago.’
My exit seemed hasty, probably because Sister Maria had sensed another traveller on the garden path. With no further word she hustled me to the terrace and left me to resume my ascent of the mountain.
Returning from the summit three hours later the garden was in shadow, the sheltered trees and bushes curiously still against an evening sky still in motion. In this quiet place a remark of Sister Maria came back to me. ‘There are always two of us,’ she had said. That thought stayed with me during my flight down the path, and lingered during the weeks that followed.
Summer had long passed when I saw the monastery again. The second nun, Sister Helena – the one holding the plate in the chapel – had become critically ill and Father Kalvos, the priest at the seminary on the coast, had asked me to fly her to the hospital. ‘She will never return to the mountain,’ he said. ‘But you cannot leave the other alone,’ I ventured. ‘Indeed not,’ he replied, ‘and that is why I have a second request. When you go you will take her replacement, Sister Anna? Sister Anna is new to the island and has not visited the mountain. She is twenty-eight years old, from an obscure convent in Czechoslovakia, about which I know almost nothing. We were very lucky to find her – or should I say she found us. It’s remarkable that someone so young and attractive should seek seclusion, but there we are. Oh, and like you she is an American.’
Father Kalvos dropped Sister Anna at the Department’s complex at the foot of the mountain. We three sat in the coffee room over steaming cups, surrounded by posters depicting the island’s fauna and flora and dire notices warning travellers against too close a familiarity with them. I congratulated myself that my Greek was now good enough to hear that Sister Anna was not yet a fluent speaker. She seemed nervous, and that was out of character. Her sparing smile appeared to result more from inner musings than the events around her. She reminded me of a philosophical prisoner being introduced to her cell. I thought of making a joke about it until it struck me that that was precisely what she was about to become. Never had my self-restraint been so tested as on that occasion.
Father Kalvos said, ‘Sister Anna tells me she is used to being alone, but I have told her she must signal to us if ever…’ He paused, choosing his next words carefully, ‘…it becomes difficult to cope. After all, Sister Maria and Sister Helena have been alone together for many years and the parting will be difficult for both of them. Hard as I tried, it was impossible to persuade Sister Maria to come down from the mountain.’ Then he whispered so that only I should hear, ‘There is no longer a need for a religious house up there.’
Sister Anna looked at me and said, ‘Father Kalvos has lectured to me on horticulture and, look, even given me some seeds to plant.’ As she spoke I saw wrinkles at her eyes: tiny crow’s feet from stress and sleepless nights that I had never seen before.
My unstifled expression of surprise must have worried her. She looked anxiously towards Father Kalvos to see if he had noticed. But he was studying the mountain through the window and concern for his charges was all I could see written on his face.
We walked together to the helicopter. Father Kalvos and Sister Anna said little to one another but perhaps they had already made their farewells. I stowed her suitcase and noted its lightness relative to its size. Then I saw she was watching me, and again there was that transient nervous smile. Throughout the flight Sister Anna looked out, across the sea, to the storm clouds that were gathering over the Turkish coast.
From a long way off we could see Sister Maria on the landing pad and, beside her, Sister Helena in her wheelchair. Closer, we saw that they were clasping each other’s hands. They continued to do so until the moment when Father Kalvos and I lifted Sister Helena into the helicopter.
Sister Maria would not let me accompany them to the building. ‘Your responsibility is to Sister Helena,’ she said. If she recognised me she gave no sign of it.
As they were walking away Sister Anna turned. ‘How often will you come?’ she asked.
‘As often as I’m needed,’ I replied.
They were the only words she spoke to me. Our second parting had been no easier than our first.
In the weeks that followed I had no further contact with the monastery. On the rare occasions I flew nearby nothing moved. I had no excuse to visit, and there was no invitation to do so, though I held myself in readiness. Easter passed. The bright sunshine – others might have supposed – led me to the path up the mountain. High up the season started later and the garden was still forlorn. I walked slowly, the better to scrutinise the buildings. The few windows that were not shuttered were dirty and lifeless. I continued on, past the helicopter landing pad and up the path to the summit of the mountain. It was a risky strategy but one for which I saw no alternative.
From the summit the other islands were black shark fins in an infested and darkening sea. When the sunlight finally left the tip of the mountain like an extinguished flame I set off back down the track, knowing that no other walker would have ventured to remain here so late. If all else failed I could lay out my sleeping bag in the wood-store, or even in one of the sheds that housed the garden implements. A lost traveller – especially one as foolish as me – would be believable.
I was in luck. The door from the terrace was not locked – but then what need was there for security? My overshoes were quite silent on the flagstones of the corridor as I made for the chapel. I listened at each of the doors as I passed, watched by the suspicious eyes of erstwhile saints in the faint candlelight. The door to the chapel was ajar, just as we had agreed it should be.
In the light of a single candle, even from the side, her drawn features were plain to see. When she turned the relief we saw in each other’s face nearly made us cry. We realised the fulfilment of our dream was almost within our grasp.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, ‘she sleeps till four and is very deaf – so often have I put that to the test.’
‘Have you found it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I’ve left it hidden in one of the caves.’
‘So can we agree a day?’
‘Yes, yes, please,’ she replied, with tears trickling down her cheeks.
I had no qualms about violating the sanctity of the chapel. It was not until much later that I pressed the small vial of sedative into her hand.
I waited until two, then crept out of the building to the wood-store, where I sat contemplating the grey mass of the mountain rising almost sheer above me. When the first rays of the sun illuminated the summit, so that within minutes it became a great pyramid of golden light, I began my descent of the path.
No-one could quite remember the sequence of events the following Thursday. Some said that Sister Maria had signalled with the torch that was trained on the police station four miles away on the coast. Others, who had been walking on the mountain, claimed that they alone carried the information Sister Maria had given them. Whichever it was, it was clear by the evening that Sister Anna had disappeared.