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 saythank 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.
