Among the Lemon Trees by Nadia Marks

Author:Nadia Marks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760551520
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2017-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

6

Contrary to what everyone had hoped, Calliope’s fall had been a very bad one. She’d been too foolhardy and high-spirited that day and had climbed way up into the tree’s top branches. Her bones might have been able to withstand the force of impact with minimal injury, but the trauma and damage to her spinal cord resulted in a neurological condition causing total paralysis of both of her legs, and partial paralysis of her left arm.

Chrisoula was inconsolable and kept blaming Andrikos for letting Calliope go up the ladder in the first place, making the poor man feel more wretched than he already was. The shock was immense for everyone, but it was Ourania who took the news the hardest. She was totally devastated for her sister, yet tried her best not to show it; she knew she had no option but to be strong for Calliope because now it was her turn to support her.

Life on a small Greek island in the 1930s was not conducive to major health problems. Dr Doumas was a good doctor and took good care of his patients but he was not equipped to deal with the severity of Calliope’s condition and the same went for the town’s hospital, which was some twenty kilometres away from the village. With its limited resources the hospital did the best it could for Calliope, but as always relied heavily on the patient’s family to help with their care. The only place Calliope would have received better medical treatment was in one of the larger hospitals on the mainland, where, if she was mobile, she could have been taken. But in her case, first in a coma and then paralysed, taking her anywhere, let alone putting her on a boat, was an impossible task.

The months that followed after Calliope left the hospital, and until a wheelchair shipped over from the mainland arrived, were the hardest for everyone. Bed-bound, Calliope felt wretched and helpless, and the logistics of moving her whenever necessary were agonizingly difficult. Yet, together with her mother, her aunt and their other sisters, Ourania did everything, and more, for Calliope. They bathed her, and put her on the commode, fed her and brushed her hair, read her books, and sang her songs. Ourania did it all willingly and lovingly, knowing without a doubt that if the roles were reversed her sister would be doing the same for her.

At first Calliope was in a state of denial; she expected that gradually her legs would recover their mobility until one day she would just get up from her wheelchair and walk again.

‘I feel a tingling in my toes,’ she’d tell Ourania. ‘Look, I think I can wiggle them.’ But of course she couldn’t.

After her initial state of despair, slowly Calliope started to come to terms with her situation, making huge efforts to deal with it in a stoic and philosophical way, as was her nature.

‘If this is my fate, I must face it and continue with the life I have been granted,’ she told Ourania.

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