The Potter’s House

Just as well, she thought afterwards. Meroula had no time for sentiment. She was as sentimental as a mousetrap.

The newlyweds gave a party on their terrace, under the newly planted vine. Everyone on the island who could get away from their summer work came, and the tavernas and restaurants operated for the night with a skeleton staff. Celia and Polly and Jack danced with the goat men, and her father got drunk and made a long speech interspersed with the classical Greek he remembered from school, to the bafflement of the entire company.

Xan and Olivia went to bed that night in their room still furnished with fruit boxes.

‘Will your mother be happy now?’ she asked.

She felt him smiling against her hair, his breath warming her scalp. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Why?’

‘There must be sons.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

That was ten years ago. In that time they had built a business together, and they had had Georgi and Theo.

Meroula put down her empty coffee cup.

‘I will walk back home with you, Mother,’ Xan said, as he always did. Olivia kissed her and Meroula submitted to the embrace.

‘Goodnight Olivia. I am grateful for the food.’

‘And we are thankful for our family.’

It was a traditional island exchange after hospitality given and received. Sometimes Olivia had to grit her teeth around the utterance more than at others.

While Xan was out Olivia finished drying up the supper dishes and put them away in the cupboard. She blew out the candles and went outside to stand on the terrace. The wind was blowing from the wrong direction. Usually at this time of night she could hear the sea, but now she caught a sound from the opposite side, a goat bell from the herd that roamed the hill. She stood for a minute, listening. The goats should be in their shelter now, not restlessly moving. It must be the thunder in the air.

Upstairs the boys were asleep in their beds. Theo’s arms and legs were flung out at angles and he held the red man firmly in one fist. Olivia kissed them both. In her own room she sat tiredly on the bed and peeled off her socks. It had been a long day.

Xan came in and closed the door.

When they were lying down together she asked, ‘What time is it?’

‘Half past eleven.’

‘Did you hear the wind?’

‘Yes. Are you sleepy?’

‘I thought I was. But now I’m not.’

‘That’s good.’

It was an hour before they finally fell asleep, at half past midnight.

Five

In the darkness I am still clinging to my bed of rock.

I can see Peter’s face and Lisa Kirk’s smile, and Andreas, and my mother and a falling statue.

Again and again, over and over, the statue’s stone arc cutting through a blue afternoon, and the terror that came after merges with the terror of this moment.

The jetty no longer exists. Even through a hanging pall of dust that thickens the darkness I can see that much. Everything has been transformed. The line of hotels along the beach front has been mashed into drunken, sloping relics. The brittle white façade of my hotel has fallen into creases with stark vertical pillars rising out of it. The corner that had once been my room is completely gone. The tall lights along the sea wall have been snapped like matchsticks and the sand in front is a greedy swirl of water.

I stagger to my feet like a drunken creature.

The jetty foundations are big, jagged boulders and I begin to scramble over them. All I can think is that I must get to the hotel. My belongings are all there, my clothes and my money and passport. Without these coverings and shreds of paper I am nothing, I am invisible.

Get to the hotel. Only a few yards away, but an interminable distance. Blocked by rubble and sea water. I must get to the hotel.

Somewhere ahead of me a woman starts wailing, a long, ululating sound of pure desolation.

Get to the hotel. People will need help.

I hear a booming noise behind me. I turn my head, a split second and out of the corner of my eye I glimpse a towering wall of water. The crest of it with an ugly lacing of foam is far higher than my head and it is racing at me, too fast to evade, even if there were anywhere to run to.

I fling up my arms to cover my head. The wave smashes into me, and my ears and eyes and lungs fill up with water. I fall and the force of the wave sweeps me away like a dead thing, arms and legs useless as I am churned in a soup of stones and sand.

The next thing I know I am lying head down, my torso twisted so I can’t breathe or cough to expel the water from my lungs.

Move. But I am pinned by rocks and the notion flutters in my weary mind: stay still. Let go and then rest.

I gather a knot of strength from somewhere within myself and strike out against the rocks. Somehow I break free of the weight and the sky steadies overhead. I can see stars, pinpricks in the dark-blue span. I am lying among boulders in what was once the garden of my hotel, where the huge wave that followed the earthquake has disgorged me.

It is no longer a garden. Tables and broken beach beds and the snapped stalks of parasols lie in a reeking jumble with sand and mud and a wreckage of fencing and pedalos and torn-up trees. Among the debris, close to my face, is a woman’s body. I can’t see her head, but from the angle of her hips and her stillness I know that she is dead.

I lie with one side of my face in the mud, shivering with fear and cold, and the beginnings of comprehension.

The earthquake must have been massive and devastating. It has not just happened in my head or in the immediate envelope of space surrounding me. The line of hotels is destroyed, the whole of Branc must be in ruins.

Maybe I am the only person left alive.

I must move. Do something.

‘Move.’ I hear my own voice croaking out the word. And in obedience to the command I lever myself on to my hands and knees, and crawl to the woman’s body. She is every bit as dead as she looks. I couldn’t see her head when I first noticed her, because it isn’t there.

I am not the only person left alive. There are shapes awkwardly moving in front of what remains of the hotel and I can hear shouting. Meshed with the shouts are thin, high screams for help. I struggle towards the figures and a shaft of light strikes across the mess in front of me. A man clambers past, dressed in fisherman’s clothes and carrying a big torch, and I struggle in his wake, drawn like a moth to the beam of light. He half turns and shouts a stream of Turkish commands, waving towards the side of the hotel.

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand,’ I shout back. He takes no notice of me at all and another man scrambles past me to answer his instructions.

Belongings and passport. The thought comes back to me and fighting disorientation I veer towards what was once the door to what were once the stairs leading to my room.

Slabs of marble facing and chunks of torn concrete and twisted rods of metal make an impenetrable barrier. There is no entering the building because there is no entry left, and nothing recognisable remaining of this corner of the hotel. Everything has sheared away and toppled into a mess of rubble, and the acrid dust from the collapse hangs in the air like poison gas. I can’t reach any of my possessions because they are buried under tons of masonry. If I had been asleep in my bed, I would be buried there with them. But instead I am outside in the darkness, unable to speak the language of the cries for help I can hear rising all around me. People are stumbling and shouting, and hauling at the wreckage.

I can’t communicate with them. I don’t know what to do. I am invisible.

I sit down in a heap against the spars of what was once the terrace bar. Only yesterday I was perching here on a tall stool, dipping my spoon into an ice cream that – after Andreas – I saw no reason not to allow myself: pistachio and almond ice cream, palest sea-green, speckled with nuts.

Now there is broken glass, a flag of half-buried awning.

The full scale of the devastation is becoming clear. I can read it in the anguished flailing of a man who is tearing handfuls of mud out of a bank of silt washed up against collapsing walls. He is shouting a name, over and over. It sounds like Oma, Oma.

There must be scenes like this all over Branc, and how far beyond that?

There are more people now and bobbing lights weaving across the ruined garden. The beams swing across a woman who is standing alone, screaming at the sky, her fists clenched above her head. They light up a man’s face, caked with grey dirt and blotted with blood. In another place I see a knot of men with garden spades who have begun to dig at the mud bank. The man in fisherman’s clothes is pointing and shouting directions but he is the only one who seems capable of organising any rescue attempt. And in the face of this devastation, rescue of any sort seems an impossibility.

Help. Sluggishly, my reactions impaired by shock, it dawns on me afresh that I should also try to help someone. Once I am on my feet I move clumsily towards the nearest light. A woman in a torn and bloodied nightdress is crouching over the wreckage of the bar. I can see her hair hanging forward in a grey coil over her shoulder, and the filth caking her wrists and arms, because there is a girl of about twelve holding a tiny torch with the narrow beam shining on her. The woman is muttering and frenziedly hauling at a painted pole that once supported the bar canopy.

I shout at her, ‘I’ll help. Who is in there?’ but she is too intent to hear me. The girl stands her ground, shivering and sobbing. When the pole comes loose the woman throws it aside without even noticing the weight. She kneels down and peers into the space and then doubles her efforts to haul away the rubble. Her hands are bleeding, but she is oblivious.

I can see a third hand, curled in the dirt.

The woman seizes it, her muttering becoming a moan. The child is shaking so much that the torch beam is jumping. There is a warning shout from further off and then a crack and rumble of a further collapse. I don’t even look around to see. I crouch down by the woman instead and begin furiously digging with my hands, hauling away debris to expose an arm and shoulder dressed in a white waiter’s jacket. The woman is pulling on the limp hand as if she could drag the buried weight out by it.

‘Stop. Help me like this,’ I order her. She doesn’t hear or can’t understand what I am saying so I labour on, moving the fallen spars as carefully as I can to spare the person beneath. It is a hard struggle, shifting the cumbersome pieces. I can see more of the waiter now. He is lying on his side with his back to us, part of his shoulders and head exposed by our efforts.

Tears are streaming down the woman’s face. She looks up beyond me and shouts for help, her mouth pulled square with desperation. Two men run to her and join their efforts to hers. Within a few minutes enough of the man’s body is freed to enable one of the rescuers to reach into the hole and work his arms under the shoulders.

I am standing to one side, my hands hanging loose.

I can’t watch this, but I must.

The waiter’s body is dragged out of its resting place and laid on the ground. His head lolls as they move him and the old woman runs to cradle it. The skin of the face is waxy, covered with mud and dirt. She rubs at it with a fold of her nightdress, whispering words of faith and encouragement, and as she smooths away the mess I recognise him. It is Jim. And I can also see that he is dead. It takes longer for the truth to dawn on his mother and sister because they fend the knowledge off with hugging the inert body and rubbing their cheeks against his.

One of the men mutters to the other and they move off to where another group of people is frantically digging and calling out. When I try to look away from Jim’s mother I see that the same scene is repeated all along the beach front. Knots of rescuers have started to claw at the fallen buildings and disorientated survivors rush from one group to the next, crying out names.

Jim’s mother is on her knees beside his body.

She can’t any longer hope that he is alive. She gathers him up in her arms, holding him against her like a baby. And she wails, a raw note of desolation that cuts the noise around us and turns everything else to silence.

I can’t bear to listen, but I can hear nothing else. The same deafening, despairing note has been in my head for ever.

Jim’s mother becomes my mother. The debris of Branc is an English garden and the fallen hotel just a stone statue. The mother lifts up a child’s body and cradles him, and her world and the rest of the world is torn to fragments.

The girl, Jim’s sister, is standing a little to one side. The torch lies at her feet, where she has just dropped it. She is white-faced and as mute as the statue and her eyes slide from her dead brother to her mother’s living horror.

I see myself in her.

But this child is blameless. None of this, the wreckage, or the wailing or the flood of horror is her fault.

It is different for me and it always has been.

And now I am a woman in my forties left standing in the aftermath of an earthquake. A new world of grief plays itself out in front of me.

A hand touches my shoulder and I spin round.

Andreas is beside me. His face blots out everything else. As if I am a tiny child and he is my powerful father, a surge of relief washes through me, diluting the grief and easing my terror. I will be safe now.

‘Look at this,’ I say, pointing to the tableau. Jim’s mother is kneeling almost at our feet.

Andreas takes hold of me. He is warm and solid, dry against my wet clothes. His arm circles my shoulders, protective and insulating. I feel myself being lifted to safety.

‘I know. There’s nothing we can do here. Come with me,’ he says.

He does know, not only about what is left of Branc and here and now, but about the steps that led me here. It was this unworded familiarity that made our day in the boat so right and even here the rightness of it stays with me.

‘We should help them.’

The girl has moved to her mother’s side. Together the two women lower Jim’s body to the ground and they sit on either side of him, holding his hands. They are both crying, but quietly now.

‘What do you want to do for them?’ Andreas gently asks.

There is nothing tangible, physical, of course. I have nothing, not even clothes, let alone light or digging implements or medical equipment. Maybe I can just tell them, I have been where you are now. You may not think it, but you can endure it. In a way, I think, looking at the young girl and remembering my six-year-old brother’s dead body and my mother holding him; you can go on living, in a way.

But what could I tell them, in English, here and now? Even the thought is a presumption.

Andreas is waiting. I can feel the tension of it in his arm.

‘I’m coming,’ I say.

But still I hover. Under the mud and dirt, Jim looks as if he was tired and has simply fallen asleep. He must have been working one of his endless shifts and now I understand that he would have been the breadwinner for these two women. I bend down, close to the girl’s thin shoulders, to express a mute goodbye. From the nearest knot of diggers there is a confusion of shouting and then terse commands leading to frantic activity. Someone else has been discovered, trapped, but this one is alive. There are many more people out now, pouring on to what is left of the beach strip with shovels and blankets and torches. A surge of them head for the new focus.

Slowly I stand up. Andreas takes my arm and leads me away.

We pick our way over rocks and through pools of filthy water. When we clamber by it I see that the woman’s body has already been covered with a torn piece of curtain. Our progress is slow because of the debris that has been flung everywhere and the hampering darkness. But still I follow Andreas unquestioningly, holding on to the anchor of his hand. I have abandoned all thoughts of my belongings. They are buried and I have no need of them. Nobody has anything now.

I stumble beside Andreas, and as we near the end of the beach and my eyes become used to the darkness I can see beyond the major wreckage of modern buildings to the old town. Some of the whitewashed old houses are still standing, because they are low-built and constructed of stone. There are flickering lights in some of these and activity as survivors are hurried into shelter. The mosque looks mostly intact but I can’t see the minarets.

There is now no sign even of the jetty foundations. The bay is a black gulf out of which huge waves rush to the shore and smash a chaotic jumble of splintered wood and hoardings and the remnants of jaunty parasols on to the ruined beach. The undertow makes a greedy noise as it sucks at the shingle.

Andreas leads me over bigger rocks, moving so fast that I am breathless. I am barefoot and the stones hurt me but I keep up with him because this is where the last thread of security resides. I can’t imagine what I would do in this desolation if he were to disappear.

We reach the lee of the headland where the waves thunder into rocky inlets, but more naturally, as if all of this could almost be the aftermath of a winter storm. There is a boat riding crazily at anchor in one of the channels. It is sawing at the anchor chain and the dark outlines of the prow and tiny cabin pitch on the wave backs. It looks like one of the fishing boats that work up and down the coast.

As soon as I am aware of it it becomes evident that this is where Andreas is leading me. It is bigger than the boat in which we sailed to our secret bay, but not by a long way.

‘Think of these people as friends,’ Andreas tells me. He has to put his mouth close to my face and his breath is warm. I realise that I am shivering uncontrollably. Shock lends everything a dreamlike dimension and I don’t question the boat or the friends, or what is about to happen. I let myself be steered, like a tired child.

Extraordinarily, there is a dinghy riding the vicious swell between the boat and the rocks. A black snake coils through the air and becomes a rope that Andreas deftly catches. He steers me forwards until I am balanced on a rock while a wave roars up around my thighs and then swirls away again, and the dinghy pitches a yard away. The rope goes taut and I cling to it.

‘Jump.’

I am past fear. Andreas’s voice is clear and I do what he tells me. I launch myself forward and there is a second of space and then I fall hands outstretched in a wet space full of net and hard edges. There is one oarsman in the boat and he moves roughly past me as Andreas jumps and lands beside me. The man takes up his oars and bends double to pull us away from the rocks but we are almost submerged as another glassy hillside of water smashes over us. The ebbing wave propels us towards the bigger boat and we collide with the flat stern. More hands reach down for the rope and make us secure.

Moving in the wake of the boatman I swarm up a precarious ladder. As soon as Andreas has landed in the bottom of the fishing boat alongside me there is a thrumming roar from the engines and I feel the propellers start churning under my ear. I lie still, exactly where I fell, and the bows come round and head into the waves. The decks rise up to what feels like the vertical and I slide backwards, and then we pitch downwards into the wave trough and I roll inertly in the opposite direction. But I can tell that we are making headway I reach out and find a locker ring and hook my fingers into that. With this purchase to cling on to I stop slithering and lie as still as I can, salt water sluicing over me. Twin images are colliding in my head. Jim and the garden. England and Branc. My mother and his mother.

Someone bumps down next to me and puts an arm under my shoulder to haul me upright. It is Andreas. I sit with my head on his shoulder and let him support me. It is cold but he makes me warm, and after a moment I can look up and try to work out what is happening.

There are three men in oilskin dungarees and thick jerseys, one at the wheel and one beside him in the half-shelter of the open wheelhouse, intent on the instruments. The third is forward in the bows, watching the walls of water rearing up and vertiginously dropping away, and shouting instructions back to his crew mates. It is several numbed minutes before I realise that the language they are using isn’t Turkish.

‘Where are we? Where are we going?’ I ask Andreas.

‘To somewhere safe,’ he tells me.

The tsunami wave struck the beach at Megalo Chorio at one twenty-six in the morning. It was generated by the shudders at the earthquake’s epicentre on the sea floor off the Turkish coast and instead of just the surface, as with ordinary waves whipped up by the wind, the whole body of the water was moving. In the shallow Aegean the wave rapidly built up to a swell of forty feet and it swept westwards at a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour.

Halemni was partially shielded from the full force of it by a scatter of small uninhabited islands to the south-east, but the impact was still massive. The wall of water thundered over the crescent of beach, uprooting half the fringe of tamarisk trees. It smashed into the village houses, surging the length of the street and through the square at the end. The houses were stonebuilt and so resisted the major shock, but the wave tore into the rooms and swirled out again, carrying a scum of broken furniture, papers, branches and ruined possessions with it. The half-built shells of flimsy concrete tourist apartments on the village outskirts collapsed like the hotels in Branc.

The wave finally collided with the hill behind the village and a backwash coursed through the houses and funnelled along the street in the opposite direction. Manolis’s blue wooden kiosk was swept away and the old fig tree in the square was torn in half. The harbour wall withstood most of the impact but the bay became a heaving morass of flotsam that crashed over the harbour with every succeeding wave.

After five minutes of booming water an eerie stillness settled over the houses again, fractured with dripping and gurgling, and the creaking of broken structures. The people of Megalo Chorio slowly released their hold on whatever fixed point they had clung to to stop being swept away, then paddled through their flooded bedrooms to open the shutters and look out into the street.

There was no power because the island’s generator station was flooded. One by one, points of candle flame wavered and steadied, and torch beams picked out the scum-laced khaki river where the cobbled road had once been. A dog howled somewhere and was answered by another.

Theo was screaming louder than the noise of the water. Georgi’s cries were lower and more confused.

Dazed with sleep but with the shock of sudden adrenalin pounding in them, Xan and Olivia stumbled out of bed and covered the soaking pitch-dark distance from their bedroom to their sons’ without stopping to light a candle or locate a torch. The familiar few steps had become an obstacle course of overturned furniture.

The screaming turned into hysterical crying as they plunged into the room.

‘I can’t see you,’ Georgi shouted.

‘I’m here. It’s all right. It’s a big wave, it’s gone.’