The Thread (18 page)

‘Sofia!’

Katerina saw that Dimitri was uncomfortable and it seemed a good moment to change the subject.

‘Come on, Dimitri,’ she said, pulling on his hand. ‘Let’s go now.’

‘And let’s find a new way home,’ suggested Maria.

They took a small road that led them northwards, away from the sea, and kept walking up and up and up until they met another big road, which they crossed, careful to avoid the huge rattling trams that hurtled towards them in both directions.

‘Where are we?’ asked Katerina timidly after twenty minutes or so of their ascent.

‘I know! I know!’ sang Sofia. ‘I know where we are!’

‘So where are we?’ challenged Maria.

‘We’re … near the cemetery,’ answered her twin, looking about her and seeing that they were now opposite the entrance to the big municipal
nekrotafio
.

‘Come on! Let’s go and see …’

‘See what?’ asked Maria.

‘What’s in there, of course!’ cried Sofia.

‘You mean “who”?’ chimed in Dimitri.

‘I suppose I do,’ she said curtly, annoyed as ever by the younger boy’s almost precocious and pedantic correction.

Confidently, they filed in through the iron gate. They were not alone in this village of the dead. Several women who were tending a family grave looked up at them and smiled. They were going about their tasks as though they were purely domestic ones, cleaning and shining a family tomb just as they would polish a step or a window at home, arranging flowers as they would for their kitchen table, and sweeping leaves just as they had in their back yards earlier that day. There were several sizeable monuments where people had erected life-size statues of their departed loved one, and in the twilight they looked as if they might come to life.

Katerina looked at the letters and poems that people left for the deceased and saw that many of the graves were newly decorated. She looked at Maria.

‘You don’t think …?’

‘No,’ Maria said firmly. ‘I don’t think your mother is here.’

Sofia was sitting on a marble step at the top of one of the cemetery’s dozen or so main ‘avenues’. She had found a family of kittens living behind one of the slabs that was an entrance to a family tomb and one of them sat on her lap purring. Their mother seemed to have disappeared. Dimitri and Elias were close by, aiming stones at a circle that they had drawn in the dust.

‘Shall we take one of them home?’

‘Don’t be silly, Sofia,’ said Maria. ‘We’ve got enough cats in our street. Come on. It’s time to go. I don’t think Katerina likes it here.’

They were relieved to have Katerina as an excuse. None of them was comfortable here in the fast-fading light with so many shadows and so many ghosts.

Eugenia had been back to the offices of the Refugee Settlement Commission. The elegant American woman who had been so kind to them a few months earlier was still there, dispensing hand-outs and advice to those in need.

‘How are the girls?’ she asked.

‘You remember us?’

Eugenia was incredulous. So many thousands of refugees had arrived in Thessaloniki since they had and most of them had passed through this office.

‘Of course. You, the twins, the little one. Every family sticks in my mind for some reason or other. Even without your twins, I would remember you. The youngest isn’t your daughter, is she?’

‘No,’ answered Eugenia. ‘And that’s why I am here. We still need to try to find her mother and sister.’

‘That’s understandable,’ smiled the American. ‘And some records have been kept. But your best starting point might be the camps close to here.’

‘But she went to Athens!’

‘The little one thinks she did, but it’s quite possible that her boat came to Thessaloniki. I think it’s worth trying the nearby camps first.’

There were several camps on the perimeter of the city and over one hundred thousand refugees were accommodated in them. The promised new housing was yet to be built. Eugenia would have to take Katerina with her in order to identify her mother, so the following day they took a bus to the outskirts of the city and began their search.

The tin town was a strange sight. Empty, five-gallon kerosene tins had been flattened out to make walls, and packing cases had been broken down and reused as wooden frames. They were makeshift, but they also had a permanence about them, which was reflected in the presence of pots planted with flowers and herbs outside their entrances. When she poked her head inside, Eugenia could see cleanly swept earthen floors and the usual layout of a simple home in Asia Minor, with heavy, woven blankets for bedding and an image of a saint tacked onto the wall.

For hours and hours they walked up and down the rows of these silvery homes, repeating the same questions over and over again. There was the occasional moment when it looked as though someone recognised the name. An old man scratched his head as if, somewhere inside his skull, he had vital information. A woman folded her arms and rocked back on her heels as if on the point of an inspired pronouncement. On both occasions, Katerina’s spirits were raised, only to be dashed when it became apparent that neither of them had the slightest idea. Everyone else immediately shook their head, or shrugged or simply ignored the question, too demoralised to be interested in someone else’s lost relative.

Eugenia always began by asking people if they knew of anyone from Smyrna. Initially, many of those they met seemed to have come from close to the Black Sea, and Eugenia even came across some families who had lived in Trebizond. There were tears and smiles of recognition between them and a few moments of reminiscence about the old life in Asia Minor, but ultimately no recognition of Katerina’s family name. None at all.

By the time they had trekked through the camp for some days, Eugenia no longer had any illusions about whether their lives would have been happier in this community of refugees. She realised that they had had immense good fortune on the day they were taken to Irini Street. Mytilini had been civilised compared with some of the scenes of squalor they had seen in this camp, and Eugenia returned to the house in the old town, full of new appreciation that they had a front door of their own.

It was looking as though Katerina had been right after all and that her mother and sister were in Athens. The American advised Eugenia that there were hundreds of thousands of refugees there too, many as yet without fixed addresses, but she would see what she could do to help them. Meanwhile, Eugenia assured Katerina that they would not give up their search. The following week they travelled to another of the camps, which was a little further away.

Maria and Sofia were not short of people willing to take care of them. Some days they went to eat with Olga and Dimitri, and on others Kyria Moreno invited them in to hers and they would eat a different style of food. Saul Moreno was usually home from work by five in the afternoon and they would sit tucked shoulder to shoulder around a table in the kitchen, the little grandmother, sometimes in her fur jacket, quietly chewing in the corner. The chaos was a pleasing one, and the food even better.

For a few days after Eugenia and Katerina returned from their fruitless search, tired out from their travels and lacking anything to eat in the house, the Moreno family continued to invite them in for meals. They enjoyed the atmosphere inside their house, with the grandmother in her traditional dress and the snatches of her lyrical Ladino.

Saul Moreno loved an audience and enjoyed repeating the stories of the Jews’ arrival from Spain. One evening in particular he was caught in a state of nostalgia for a time he had not lived through but whose legacy he enjoyed. He quietly admitted to Eugenia that the twentieth century had not, so far, been their best time and that life had been better before 1912, when the city was still part of the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim authorities had been more tolerant of the Jews than the Orthodox Greeks, who had made Sunday the official day of rest and disregarded the importance of the Sabbath.

The children were fidgeting now, coughing, shifting in their chairs and bored with his meanderings.

‘I’m not saying it’s bad now,’ he said, leaning across to Eugenia. ‘But it’s not quite what it was before we had the Fire. And then all the Muslims left, as you know. That didn’t help. All these changes have made us the minority, which has given us a few problems, of course.’

‘Come on, dear, don’t dwell on it too much.’ Kyria Moreno patted his arm. ‘It isn’t so bad now. You mustn’t bore poor Eugenia with it all.’

Elias stifled a yawn and was nudged in the ribs by his older brother.

‘He’s not boring me at all,’ responded Eugenia. ‘It’s reassuring to know that we weren’t the first people to arrive here without homes.’

‘You certainly weren’t. Perhaps you will have a golden age, just like we did.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Eugenia. ‘But things will do as they are for now. Though perhaps with a few more husbands coming back …’

The domestic tasks had piled up while Eugenia had been away. After washing the floor, she made her priority the laborious process of laundering the sheets. Seeing the opportunity to make a game of slapping each other with wet fabric, Maria and Sofia were happy to wring out the great expanses of white cotton. Katerina then helped Eugenia to hang them up. Once the job was completed, they all went inside.

‘Katerina,’ said Eugenia, ‘shall we sit down and write a letter to your mother? The American lady says she will help to deliver it.’

Out in the fresh air, their sheets fluttered from the balcony.

Many miles away in Athens, Katerina’s mother was also hanging up her washing. In the plush setting of the Athens Opera House, she spread a damp blouse over the edge of a balcony.

All around the capital city, refugees were being accommodated in schools, theatres, churches, and anywhere else where they could find room for their children and themselves to store a few belongings and to sleep at night,

The Opera House was the latest building to throw open its doors to the refugees. At night, people slept in rows on the hard, raked stage or across the creaking velvet seats in the stalls. Bigger families were given one of the Grand Circle boxes as a temporary home. They were the envy of the whole theatre, with their privacy and their carpeted floor.

The once elegant building now looked like a rubbish dump and stank like an open sewer. There was no running water and occasionally someone tried to light a fire for cooking, adding the stench of smouldering velvet to the already repulsive repertoire of smells.

Zenia and her baby had been allocated a space in the Dress Circle, along with other mothers and small children. In the same section, there were some of her old neighbours from Smyrna. They had managed to stay together since they had fled their homes. These women comforted Zenia in the loss of her daughter and reassured her that they would be reunited, promising to do everything they could to help her. She found it hard to forget that they were the same ones who had prevented her from leaving the little boat when she realised that Katerina was not with them. To this day she wondered why she had listened to them. She found it hard to forgive and the bitterness remained with her.

Over the months, Zenia had learned why they had been so anxious about the risk of her capsizing the boat. They were not concerned for their own lives. They had managed to save the relics and a few icons from their neighbourhood church in Smyrna and were, even then, planning the new church they would build with the fragments of the old. These irreplaceable remnants of their past life had been lying in the bottom of the rowing vessel and they would have done anything they could to prevent her jeopardising their survival. For that reason alone they had stood between her and Katerina.

Zenia tried to put these thoughts out of her mind. She grieved for her dead husband and her vanished daughter, and once a day left the noisy squalor of the Opera House for a nearby church. As she kissed the glass panel that stood between her and the icon of the
Panagia
, she wondered how many of the lip-prints were hers. Each day she came to ask for the same thing: knowledge. She was in mourning, without even knowing if her loved one was dead.

Had Katerina escaped the vengeance of the Turkish cavalry? Zenia had no desire for more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The stories of organised rape and decapitation had quickly spread outside Smyrna. All she wanted was to know whether her child was alive or dead, however painful the discovery might be.

There was talk of some permanent new homes for the inhabitants of the Opera House, which elicited a stirring of excitement. Zenia fantasised: there would be a hearth, an outdoor toilet, a table and chairs, a cot for the baby and a couch for Katerina. As if to fuel her daydream, one of her neighbours in the Dress Circle told her about some people who might be able to put her in touch with her daughter.

‘They might be able to locate her and deliver a letter. Why don’t you write and see what happens? There’s no harm in trying, is there?

The next day, she found her way to the offices of the Refugee Resettlement Commission.

‘My little girl is too young to read properly,’ she explained to a woman sitting at a desk, ‘but someone, somewhere might know her name and know where she is …’

‘Yes,’ said the woman, repeating Zenia’s words, parrot-like but with a thick French accent. ‘Someone, somewhere might know …’

The woman looked at the letter with indifference and tossed it onto a pile on her desk.

‘Katerina Sarafoglou,’ read the envelope. ‘Once of Smyrna.’

Zenia had little hope that it would reach its destination but what other options did she have? It was like an arrow shot blindly into the darkness.

F
OR SEVERAL YEARS
, Katerina diligently continued to write her letters but received no replies. This did not deter her. It was a good way of practising her handwriting. Every few months, even though her desperation to find her mother diminished, her ability to form her letters increased. The one-way correspondence recorded what she had been doing and related how she spent her days. They were the diary of a very happy child.