The Thread (21 page)

‘But why don’t you want to learn a skill?’ their mother appealed. ‘If you start learning something now, you will be an expert in it before you are twenty. Don’t you want that?’

‘We don’t want to be sitting inside a dark house for the rest of our lives,’ answered Sofia.

‘And we would be with lots of other people,’ said Maria.

‘And we would get paid by the amount we process.’

‘But that’s the same with weaving,’ said Eugenia. ‘I get paid for every rug I finish.’

‘But it takes you months to make a rug!’

‘That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t get paid more each month than the girls who are paid every week for their tobacco sorting!’

It seemed that someone had already done a good job of persuading the girls that their future lay in the enormous tobacco trade that thrived in northern Greece.

Katerina cowered in the corner. She was still too young to have been targeted by the farmers who had been allowed access into the school, and in any case she would not have been open to their propaganda. Whenever this argument was brewing, she slipped away next door.

Roza Moreno loved it when Katerina appeared in her house. She was always busy, whatever the time or day, but she happily chatted while she worked. There was generally a close-packed rack of jackets that she had finished that day, their immaculate buttonholes completed and buttons sewn on (as many as a dozen if it was double-breasted and had small buttons down each cuff ). Finally she had stitched a label onto the satin lining: ‘M
ORENO &
S
ONS
, Master Tailors of Thessaloniki’.

‘Every time I finish a garment and read those words,’ she told Katerina, ‘I feel proud.’

The original Moreno had been Saul’s great-grandfather, and the skill had now been passed down through three generations. With their two sons, there would be a fourth.

Much of Roza Moreno’s day was spent working with suiting fabrics: wools and tweeds in the winter, and sometimes linen in the summer. More than a thousand times, Katerina had watched her neatly and rhythmically stitching a buttonhole. It mesmerised her to see a human being working like a machine, but this was not really why she came.

As well as the finishing touches on suits, Roza specialised in the fine crochet work and embroidery that people wanted for their trousseaux. She had a high reputation among the very wealthy Europeans for this, and to teach a little girl, with the finest fingers she had ever seen, was a joy. She taught Katerina everything, from the basic requirements to keep the skin on the hands smooth so that nothing would catch, to the importance of threading silk correctly so that it ran along the weft of the fabric. The minutiae of the craft were crucial and, once learned, never forgotten.

Very soon, when Katerina copied some of her stitches, Roza could not tell the difference between those of the child and her own. Kyria Moreno was a virtuoso, but Katerina, her pupil, was a prodigy.

On the evening when the row over the tobacco factories was in full swing, Kyria Moreno was, as ever, delighted to see her. It meant she could put the man’s jacket to one side and indulge her real passion.

‘Hello, Katerina!’ she said. ‘How are you today?’

‘Very well, thank you, Kyria Moreno. And how is Kyria Moreno today?’

She nodded her head in the direction of the corner where Kyria Moreno’s mother-in-law always sat. The elder Kyria Moreno was very silent these days and most of the time appeared unaware of her surroundings. She was like a waxwork, dressed in the finery of traditional Sephardic dress, to be admired like a work of art.

‘We’re very well, aren’t we, Kyria Moreno?’

Roza Moreno was in the habit of speaking to her mother-in-law as well as speaking for her, so a strange monologue would often go on in front of the apparently comatose old lady.

‘Shall we get the box down, then?’

Katerina pulled a chair over towards a high shelf and climbed up to get a wooden box. It seemed almost as big as she was, but she managed to slide it off the shelf and pass it down to Kyria Moreno, who put it in the centre of the table.

Katerina ran her hand over the lid, enjoying the patina of smoothness, and traced with her finger the delicate image of the pomegranate, which had been inlaid into its surface. The box was oval, lined with pale pink silk and the lid itself was padded. The interior space was divided into tidy compartments, within which were spools of white cotton for lace, lengths of fine gauze edging, skeins of silk in pastel colours, tiny spools smaller than a little finger and, in the padding of the lid itself, needles were ranged in size order.

From a smaller box, Roza Moreno got out some silk lingerie, which was being kept pristine betwen layers of tissue. It was for the daughter of a wealthy client and to be worn on her wedding day. There was to be no expense spared on either the gown, which was being produced in the workshop, nor on the garments that were to be worn beneath it.

They both sat down at the table, next to each other so that Katerina could follow Roza’s hands and copy.

‘Can you pass them to me?’

When Katerina picked up the weightless silk culottes they ran like cool water through her fingers.

‘Here you are,’ she said giggling, as they landed on the linen table cloth. ‘It’s as though they aren’t really there!’

‘This is the flimsiest fabric that you can actually sew,’ said Kyria Moreno. ‘Any finer and there’s not a needle in the world that’s small enough.’

Katerina had her own scrap of silk
crêpe de Chine
to work on. She had already embroidered the edging and was now starting work on some lettering. Her plan was to complete a whole name in the same scripted style that her teacher was using for the underclothes. It took huge skill and concentration to place the point of the needle correctly so that it did not snag the fabric, but the child was determined and her skill seemed innate.

‘Can you thread a number eight for me?’

A number 8 was very fine and would smoothly slip through fabric without leaving a mark. First of all, Kyria Moreno split the silk into two ‘filos’ and further subdivided one of those so that they would be sewing with something finer than human hair. She then relied on Katerina’s eagle-sharp eyesight to thread the silk. She made no knot in the thread as the ends would be hidden invisibly within the fabric.

Then they both began to sew. The art was to ‘inscribe’ the name in stitches, and to make it look as though it was spontaneously written like a signature, a style which made the garment completely personal for the wearer.

They worked for an hour or more, with the muffled sound of the continuing argument coming through the wall. Roza hummed as she sewed, very quietly and under her breath, every so often looking down to her left where Katerina was studiously working her way along the name, each stitch taking her closer to the flower with which she was going to finish it off.

‘That’s perfect,
glyki mou
, flawless, sweetheart,’ Roza said. ‘Don’t you think you should be going home soon, though?’

‘I want to finish this first,’ Katerina said without a second’s hesitation. ‘And anyway, Kyria Eugenia will call me when it’s time.’

‘I should stop now, my eyes are so tired, but I’ll keep you company! When Saul comes in, I’ll stop.’

Kyria Moreno had finished the name in pale pink on the culottes and now folded them carefully and replaced them in the box, which she then tied up with ribbon. They would not come out until the wedding day.

Then she picked up the sewing that she did purely for her own pleasure. It was a piece of embroidery that was both finished and unfinished, a work in progress that she might be adding to for the rest of her life: an embroidered quilt that was already in use on her bed with appliquéd birds, fruit, flowers and butterflies. She would always find a space to add another tiny bunch of grapes, a sprig of jasmine or, as she was doing today, some orange blossom.

‘It’s my own little paradise,’ she said.

For Roza Moreno, the quilt that kept both her and her devoted husband warm at night was a profoundly symbolic work.

‘Even if I live for another thousand years,’ she said, ‘it will never be finished. It had a beginning but it will never have an end.’

Roza’s words lodged themselves in Katerina’s mind. For ever after, love and sewing would be linked.

Not many minutes before Saul arrived home, Katerina completed her final stitch and proudly put her finished work down on the table, replacing the tiny needle in the cushioned lid of the sewing box.

‘This is beautiful, Katerina,’ said Roza putting her own sewing aside to admire it. She had been watching the child working on this piece for some weeks now, and without doubt it was the best thing she had ever done. ‘Shall we find some tissue to wrap it in?’

Once it was wrapped, it was time for her to go home. The smell of Eugenia’s stuffed vegetables,
gemista
, was wafting in from next door and telling her that dinner must be almost ready.

The debate over the twins’ future was still raging and continued at the supper table.

‘But Isaac has left school already!’ whined Sofia.

‘So why can’t we?’ continued Maria.

Eugenia calmly continued to chop the tomatoes for their salad. Her twins had never enjoyed being at school and she knew that they often skipped lessons. It appeared that they had not really seen the purpose of an education in the classroom and wanted to be in the outside world, enjoying their freedom.

‘It’s different for Isaac. He has a family business to go into. And he is an apprentice,’ she responded calmly.

The three girls sat at the table waiting for their dinner. Maria was breaking a piece of bread into tiny pieces, agitated. Sofia, always the spokesman for the pair of them, was determined to pursue the subject.

‘So why can’t we be apprentices?’

‘You can be. We can try and find an apprenticeship with a weaver. Or I could teach you.’

‘But we don’t
want
to do what you do.’

Eugenia knew as well as both the twins did that neither of them had the patience for either weaving or sewing. Sofia had once produced a very crude sampler, but Maria’s fingers were not nimble enough even for the most basic of stitches. Nevertheless, Eugenia did not want them to become ‘tobacco girls’. She had no idea where such a life would lead.

The argument went round in circles. Katerina sat quietly, ate what was put on to her plate and then crept up to bed. She took the gift-wrapped package out of her pocket and put it under her pillow.

The next morning, before she left for school, Katerina put her present on the stool next to the loom. It was Eugenia’s name day and the child knew that when all the household chores were done, she would be sitting down to weave.

When Eugenia unwrapped the package and the handkerchief fell into her hand, her eyes widened with amazement. There was something that astonished her even more than the delicate perfection of her name and the shaded petals of the rose. Hovering above the perfectly embroidered flower was a butterfly with wings and antenna. The detail was extraordinary. Still holding it in her hand, she hastened next door.

‘Roza,’ she said, as she lifted the curtain and walked into the Moreno house, ‘Have you seen this?’

‘Yes, of course. I watched her doing it.’

‘I don’t know what to say …’

‘This child has a great gift. Like you, I was amazed to see what she had been doing.’

‘But how can a child of ten sew like this?’

‘I don’t know. Even Saul says he has never seen anything like it. I taught her the basics, but she is in a league of her own.’

‘It really is hers, then? I thought for a moment that you must have helped her …’

‘I didn’t touch it! It’s all her own work, believe me. My own embroidery looks clumsy next to hers.’

‘I wish my twins had some of her talent …’

The two women laughed together and chatted for a while, before Eugenia got up to leave. She had a rug to finish that month and needed to put in as many hours as she could that day.

‘
Xronia Polla, Eugenia
,’ said Kyria Moreno. ‘Happy Name Day.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eugenia. ‘Come to us later on and share some
glyko
,’ she smiled.

She returned to the house and spent the rest of the morning weaving, alternately daydreaming of a secure future for Katerina and worrying about what the future held for her stubborn twins.

Her reverie was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. It was the postman. His visits to 5 Irini Street were relatively rare now, as Zenia’s letters had become less frequent, but they greeted each other and Eugenia held out her hand, expecting to be handed the usual small, pale envelope with its familiar spidery handwriting.

This time, however, the letter was typewritten and the name on the outside of the envelope was hers.

It was clear from its style that the government had sent out thousands of such letters, identical in every detail but the name itself. It simply recorded that Eugenia’s husband, ‘Mikaelis Karayanidis’, (the name was handwritten in a space) had not been seen for five years and, although there was no definitive proof, he must now be presumed dead.

Months had gone by during which Eugenia had not even given him a thought, so now it was hard to grieve. She had done that a long time ago.

When the three girls returned from school that afternoon, the twins began to make a cake. It was a messy and chaotic concoction of ground almonds, honey and sugar, which would be big enough for the whole street to celebrate their mother’s name day.

She would have to choose her moment to tell the girls, but as they laughed and chattered over the mixing bowl, she felt that now was not the right one.

Later that evening, when the Moreno family had left and the big plate that had held the cake had been scraped clean, Eugenia gave the girls the sad news. They received it with equanimity. Neither of them had any recollection of their father.

‘I knew he was dead,’ said Sofia.

‘How?’ challenged Maria.

‘I just did. Ages ago.’

‘You always know everything,’ said Maria, resenting her sister’s gift of prophecy.