The Thread (17 page)

‘What colour would you like?’ he asked, picking up a huge pair of scissors.

‘Blue …’

‘Blue?’ he chuckled. ‘I have a few of those. Perhaps three hundred different blues. Baby blue, indigo blue, aqua blue, cerulean, cobalt, sapphire, navy, turquoise … Which is your favourite?’

Katerina could see that he was smiling, proud of the extraordinary range of colours that were crammed into this small shop.

‘I don’t know. Which is your favourite?’ she asked.

‘Do you know I have never been asked that before,’ he replied, more amused than ever by this child. ‘When my customers come in here, they usually have a fixed idea about what they want, so I don’t normally give my view.’

‘My mother is like that,’ answered Katerina. ‘When she is making a dress for me she always knows what she wants. I never get to choose. So you tell me which one to have.’

‘Well, in that case, as you ask, I will give you my favourite colour. I don’t have much of it left, but it’s special and some of the wealthy ladies have taken to edging their hats with this one.’

He tucked his scissors into the pocket of his apron, slid his wooden ladder along the shelving, climbed right to the top, reached up to the very highest shelf and removed a reel.

‘It’s what we call a navy blue,’ he called down to her. ‘But this one has a gold thread running through the middle. I added it myself. And the ladies seem to love it.’

Balancing on his ladder, he snipped off two pieces each about fifteen centimetres in length and replaced the reel.

Back on the ground, he held out the pieces of ribbon to Katerina, who meanwhile had tried to plait her hair.

‘Thank you,’ she said, tying them into untidy bows. The flashes of gold in the ribbon were incongruously luxurious against her dirty dress. ‘Thank you so much! It’s beautiful.’

She examined it closely, fingering the gold stitching in admiration.

‘I’m looking for my mother. She makes dresses. Did she come in to buy ribbon?’

The way she asked the question made the shopkeeper think that this girl and her mother had become separated on their shopping errands.

‘Where were you when you last saw her?’ he asked helpfully. ‘I am sure when you make your way home, you’ll find she is there. She must be getting anxious about you.’

‘She won’t be at home. She doesn’t know where I live. I haven’t seen her for ages and ages.’

The old man looked quizzical.

‘We were in Smyrna,’ she added. ‘And I lost her.’

She did not really need to tell him any more. The world now knew about the destruction of Smyrna and the consequences for its population.

‘Whatever happens, I’m not going to give up looking,’ she added.

Her childish optimism pained him. She obviously had no idea how big and chaotic this city was, and did not realise how much confusion the current influx of people had created. The haberdasher was lost for words. He did not want to destroy her hope, but nor did he feel it should be false.

As if to conceal his fear for her, he said brightly: ‘Well, tell me what she looks like and if anyone like that comes into my shop, I will send her to see you.’

Slowly and meticulously, Katerina gave the names of her mother and sister and watched as he wrote them down:

‘Zenia Sarafoglou, brown hair, brown eyes, with a baby called Artemis.’

Her sleeve had ridden a little way up her arm and the huge scar on her arm caught his eye. He felt even more pity for her than before. There was nothing distinctive about her mother’s name and this child had little hope of finding them so all he could do was to be kind. Her obvious delight in these small pieces of ribbon touched him deeply.

‘I promise to keep an eye open for her and you must come in for some new ribbon whenever you like. How about that?’

Katerina smiled from ear to ear, distracted a little from the task of finding her mother.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘My name’s Katerina, by the way.’

‘And mine is Kyrios Alatzas.’

She was back in Irini Street even before Eugenia had noticed her gone. Sofia was now being taught some hoop-balancing skills by Dimitri, Maria was still indoors and Eugenia was still engaged in conversation with their neighbours. Some other women had joined the group.

For the next few days, accompanied by one or both of the twins, Katerina made a more concentrated search for her mother. She poked her head inside churches, mosques and synagogues, many of them burned out by the 1917 fire. In some of them, groups of refugees were still sheltering.

The streets in Thessaloniki were full of trees, planted there to provide shade in the searing heat of summer. Nowadays they had become notice boards for desperate relatives who had put up appeals for missing family members. Though Katerina herself could not decipher them, Maria and Sofia read her the names. Her mother’s Christian name was quite common, so that a hundred times a day her heart would lift, but when they read out the family name that followed her hopes came crashing down.

The three girls became more adventurous in their exploration of the city and walked away from the twisting streets of the old town towards the commercial centre of the city. On their way they passed the fragrant smells of the flower market and the groups of barrows that had been trundled for many kilometres by the farmers and their wives from smallholdings outside the city. Crouching down in the shadow of their own wheels, they waited for customers to come and buy their tomatoes, melons, potatoes and aubergines.

When they reached the grand neo classical building that was home to the biggest bank in Thessaloniki, they knew they were almost at the sea. Katerina loved to sit at the water’s edge with her legs dangling down almost into the water and for a moment she liked to let her eyes lose their focus until she could only see the dancing sparkle of the water. After a few minutes, the twins would tug, one on each arm, to pull her up and away.

‘Come on, Katerina! It’s time to go! Mother will be anxious!’

In reality, Eugenia knew that they would not get lost and was happy to have them out of the house for a while. What the twins really wanted was to go and feast their eyes on their favourite sight: the department store. Here the window displays provided a free and everchanging picture show. It was one of the first such shops in the city and the owner skilfully displayed everything from dresses and shoes, to glassware and chinaware. It seemed to them a palace, a place where a princess would shop. They saw well-coiffed women and their beautifully dressed children going inside, and dreamed.

Even when they became a familiar sight, shopkeepers and stallholders always smiled when they saw the girls coming; the spectacle of the twins’ uncanny similarity and the way in which their gestures mirrored each other fascinated everyone. They looked like a pair of rag dolls with their long plaited hair. Even the wrinkles in their socks seemed to match and their shoes were identically scuffed.

Most days when they were out in their street, they saw Dimitri and Elias. Sometimes they were trying to play
tavli
and on other occasions they were kicking a ball. One day Dimitri was alone with his hoop.

‘Where’s your friend?’ Katerina asked him.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you have any brothers and sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Or a father? I don’t have one.’

‘Yes. I do have a father. But he’s working on a new warehouse and a new home for us as well.’

He explained how his father was rebuilding a house on the waterfront and that one day they would go and live there.

Katerina listened, her eyes round with disbelief. Sometimes she and the twins had looked at the homes by the sea and wondered if they were for the royal family. Perhaps this explained why Dimitri looked so different from the other children in the street. The three girls often giggled when they saw him with his pressed trousers and gleaming white shirt. Sometimes his knees were dirty, but the rest of him always looked shiny. Even his friend Elias used to tease him. Saul Moreno tried to make sure his sons were neatly dressed, simply because it was a bad advertisement for his tailoring business if his own children were not turned out smartly, but even if they began the day looking well turned out, they both looked scruffy by lunchtime.

‘We sometimes go and look at the boats,’ said Katerina, ‘all on our own. Why don’t you come with us?’

Dimitri had overheard his father talking about these ‘new’ Greeks and knew that he was not meant to get too close to them. He heard the words
prosfiges
– refugees – and
Mikrasiates
– people from Asia Minor – and they were not spoken kindly. Even worse, thought Dimitri, he heard they had been ‘baptised in yogurt’, which sounded very unhygienic to him, and it was only years later that he realised this was a derogatory term to describe the Christians who had arrived as part of the population exchange. Now that he was standing up close to this girl he realised that she did not smell at all. His father must be wrong. These new girls seemed the same as the girls in his school, even if they were much scruffier.

Dimitri wanted to explore Thessaloniki with Katerina, but his mother was anxious for two reasons. Over the past few months, a strong but irrational fear of the city had grown inside her. Although she felt safe in Irini Street, anywhere beyond the end of the cobbled road terrified her. Pavlina had urged her not to communicate such feelings to her son.

The other reason for wanting to keep Dimitri close by was that his father might pay one of his visits. Even though he never stayed long, he usually called in to the house twice a week. Dimitri knew this was why he was always kept so clean, why his mother insisted on him wearing a clean shirt every day, why he had to wash his face morning and night and why his fingernails had to be scrubbed. These ablutions were ‘just in case’.

On the occasions when he did appear in Irini Street, Konstantinos Komninos always had two duties. If it was the evening, he stopped to pass the time of day with Saul Moreno, who was one of many Jewish tailors who bought his cloth. His main purpose, though, was to inspect his son. He looked him up and down, and once even pulled at his ear to see behind it.

One day Konstantinos came for another reason. Dimitri was sent upstairs where he sat on his narrow bed and listened to the noises from down below. Cutting through the silence, he heard an unfamiliar sound. An adult was sobbing. Dimitri knew it was his mother. He crept to the top of the laddered staircase and listened.

It was like two lines of piano music: in the right hand, the sound of Olga’s crying, and, in the left, his father’s voice. They interwove, neither louder than the other, both of them equally audible. There were many words Dimitri did not understand or could not make out, but a few were familiar to him. ‘Smyrna’ and ‘Asia Minor’ were among them.

The sound of his mother’s crying drew him down the staircase. His father sat opposite Olga, reading from a sheet of paper. He stopped when he saw his son appear at the foot of the stairs.

‘Dimitri!’ he shouted angrily.

‘Dimitri,’ echoed his mother’s quiet voice. ‘Go back upstairs, my darling, quickly now.’

The child was frozen to the spot. He was mesmerised. He had never seen his mother look like this. Her usually perfect hair was hanging loose. Her eyes were swollen.

‘Well, I suppose the boy should know,’ his father said, folding the paper and putting it into an envelope.

There was a moment of silence. Dimitri stood on the step, unsure whether he was allowed into this adult tableau of announcements and tears. He wanted to run to his mother, but feared his father’s reaction.

‘Your uncle Leonidas was reported missing some time ago in Turkey, but his body has now been found.’

It was a solemn fact, stated by Konstantinos without emotion. Dimitri listened. He had such strong and happy memories of his uncle, but this was not what upset him most. It was the sight of his mother so badly affected by what she had just heard that he would never forget.

Later that afternoon, when his father had left, his mother’s hair was once again in place and Kyria Eugenia came to the house to see her neighbour, Dimitri went out into the street and found Katerina and the twins.

‘Next time you go to the sea,’ he said, ‘I want to come too.’

A
FTER MUCH PERSUASION
from Pavlina, Olga eventually agreed to let her son explore the streets where she had grown up herself.

‘Even if you’re too afraid to walk them,’ the trusted housekeeper argued, ‘There’s no reason to keep your son locked up inside. He’s got to learn.’

Having conceded, there was one stipulation she wanted to make: the outings must remain a secret from his father.

These were carefree times for Dimitri. As well as the three girls, Elias and Isaac usually came too. There were plenty of other groups of children on the street so their own small gang, strolling, chatting and playing hide-and-seek, turned no heads. Dimitri always had a few coins so they were able to buy
koulouria
, the circular sesame buns, from the street vendor. These kept their stomachs full until they went home.

Once or twice they found themselves close to one of the Komninos warehouses and so they took a detour away from it towards the sea. Many times they caught a glimpse of the huge seafront mansion that was under construction. The scaffolding was still up but the windows were now in.

‘You’ll soon be going to live there, then?’ asked Katerina, one afternoon.

Dimitri did not answer. He looked blankly at the enormous house with its fluted pillars and grand stairway to the front door. It did not seem to have anything to do with him. The house in Irini Street had always been his home and he feared the day when he would be leaving it to live with a father he hardly knew.

‘Will we be able to come and see you? Will we be allowed in?’ teased Sofia.

They may have been physically identical, but Sofia and Maria had little else in common. Maria noticed that Dimitri seemed to blanch at Sofia’s teasing questions.

‘Stop it, Sofia.’

‘But will your father let us in, with our scruffy clothes and holey socks?’