The Potter’s House

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’smotherbecomesmymother.ThedebrisofBrancisanEnglishgardenandthefallenhoteljustastonestatue.Themotherliftsupachild’sbodyandcradleshim,andherworldandtherestoftheworldistorntofragments.

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.