The Thread (5 page)

She did wonder, however, what it would have been like to marry for love, and realised that the possession of beauty had both saved and condemned her. Olga knew how it felt to be a commodity, like a roll of silk or a gilded statue, purchased and displayed.

As she grew older, she had begun to see how physical perfection could be a burden, but at the same time she was seized with anxiety when she lost it. Over the past months she had watched the expansion of her body with growing alarm: the engorgement of her veins, the protrusion of her navel and the bulging of her stomach until the skin was so stretched beyond its limits that the outer layer appeared to split apart, leaving dozens of pale streaks, like raindrops running down a windowpane.

Though the nausea she experienced meant that she ate almost nothing, her body continued to expand. Each morning, as Pavlina braided her mistress’s ebony hair and wound it around her head, the women talked to each other’s reflection.

‘You are still as beautiful as you ever were,’ Pavlina reassured her. ‘You’re just a little plumper round the middle.’

‘I feel swollen, Pavlina. Not at all beautiful. And I know Konstantinos can’t bear me any more.’

Pavlina’s met Olga’s glance in the mirror and saw her sadness. Olga looked almost more beautiful when she was unhappy. When they were moist, her molasses-dark eyes gained even greater depth.

‘He’ll come back to you,’ said Pavlina. ‘As soon as the baby has been born, everything will be back in place. You’ll see.’

Pavlina could speak with some authority. She had borne four children before the age of twenty-two and after the first three births she was living proof that the dramatic expansion of the female body during pregnancy could be reversed. Following her fourth pregnancy, however, her body finally lost its elasticity. Olga glanced at the comfortable figure of her housekeeper, who looked more like someone on the point of giving birth than she did herself.

‘I hope you’re right, Pavlina,’ she said, putting aside the cloth to which she was slowly and ineptly adding an edging.

‘When exactly are you planning to get that finished?’ teased Pavlina, as she picked up the tiny sheet to examine her mistress’s handiwork. ‘The baby is due this month, isn’t he? Or is it next year?’

In six months, Olga’s attempts at embroidery had scarcely progressed. The needle slipped through her sweating fingers and several times she had pricked herself and droplets of blood had stained the creamy linen.

‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?

Pavlina smiled and took it from her. She could not deny this statement. Olga’s hands were not made for embroidery. Though her fingers were slim and elegant, she had no knack with a needle. For her, it was purely an activity with which to kill time.

‘I’ll launder it and then finish it off for you, shall I?’

‘Thank you, Pavlina. Would you mind?’

During all these months of sickness, Olga had been uncomfortable, but in the early hours of that August morning these feelings of restlessness overpowered her. She could not lie still even for a minute. Her back ached more when she was sitting than standing and the pains in her abdomen, which had been mild for a week or so, intensified. Every few moments she almost passed out with the pain. Finally her time had come.

Although it was a Saturday, Konstantinos left for his offices at six thirty, as usual.

‘Goodbye, Olga,’ he said, coming into the bedroom during a moment when the contractions had receded. ‘I’ll be at the showroom. Pavlina can send for me if you need.’

She attempted a smile as he put his hand on hers. It was meant to reassure her, but it was as fleeting as a feather’s touch, a perfunctory gesture that made her feel less loved rather than more. He seemed oblivious to her pain, and appeared not to have noticed the soft moans that she had been making when he entered the room.

Soon she was howling, as the waves of pain overwhelmed her, gripping on to Pavlina until the housekeeper’s arm bore her fingerprints. Surely such terrible agony could only mean the end of life, not the beginning.

Passers-by heard the occasional agonising scream but such a sound was common in this city, and the noise was swallowed up in the general cacophony of trams, carts and street traders. At ten o’clock, Pavlina sent for Dr Papadakis, who confirmed that the baby would soon be arriving. Konstantinos Komninos’ position in the community meant that the doctor would stay until the baby arrived safely.

In the final hours of labour Olga did not, for a moment, let go of Pavlina’s hand. Without it she feared being drawn inexorably into a dark tunnel of pain that would take her away from the world.

With her spare hand, Pavlina mopped her mistress’s brow with cool water, which was constantly brought up from the kitchen.

‘Try to get her to relax a little,’ the doctor advised Pavlina.

The housekeeper knew from her own experiences that when pain was ripping your body into two, this was an absurd suggestion. She would like to tell him what she thought, but there was no point. She bit her lip. The man was in his seventies. How ever many thousands of babies he might have delivered in his career, he could never even get close to imagining what Olga was experiencing.

The bed was wet with sweat, with water and with the liquid that burst from her body like a flood. Olga felt herself drifting almost out of consciousness, and thought of the nightmare she had had all those weeks ago – and which had often recurred in some form during the past few days.

The doctor had settled himself into a comfortable chair and sat reading a newspaper, occasionally consulting his pocket watch then glancing over at Olga. It seemed as though he was monitoring her, or perhaps he was just calculating how long it would be before he would be eating his lunch.

With the heavy curtains almost shut, the room was in near darkness. He held his newspaper up to catch the shaft of light that found its way in. Only when her screams seemed as though they might shatter the mirror did he actually get up. Without getting close enough to endanger the perfection of his pristine, pale suit, he began to issue some more instructions.

‘I can see the baby’s head. You need to push now, Kyria Komninos.’

Nothing seemed more natural to her. Every part of her being felt this urge, but at the same time, it seemed an impossibility, as though she must turn her body inside out.

Perhaps an hour went by. For Pavlina it seemed a day, and for Olga an unquantifiable amount of time during which her life was measured only by waves of pain. She entered a state of delirium. She did not know that she had been close to cardiac arrest, and that the baby’s distressed heart was within a beat of failure. She was aware only of the pain. It was all that seemed real for these final moments of her labour.

A baby swam out of the darkness into the half-light of the room. And screamed. Olga’s pains had ceased so she knew the high wail did not belong to her. This was a new sound.

She lay still and silent for a few moments. Breathless. Tears of exhaustion and relief coursing down her face. Olga became aware that the attention of the two people looking after her had shifted away and was focused on something across the room. Their backs were turned towards her and instinctively she knew not to disturb them.

She closed her eyes for a moment and listened to their quiet murmurings. She had no reason to be concerned. Olga felt the presence of a fourth person in that room. She knew he was there.

‘Kyria Olga …’

Olga saw Pavlina at her bedside. Against the whiteness of her blouse and the ampleness of her bosom, the small white bundle was almost invisible.

‘Your … baby.’ She almost choked on the words. ‘Here is your baby. Your son. Your boy, Kyria Olga!’

And there, indeed, he was. Pavlina lowered the tiny thing down into Olga’s open arms and mother and son looked at each other for the first time.

Olga could not speak. A powerful surge of love flowed out of her. Never had she felt anything as strong as the unconditional adoration that she felt for this small being in her arms. In that moment of meeting eyes, an unbreakable bond was made.

A message was sent to Konstantinos Komninos and, when he arrived, Dr Papadakis was waiting for him downstairs.

‘You have a son and heir,’ he informed him proudly, as though he had been responsible for the entire procedure.

‘That’s excellent news,’ responded Komninos, in the tone of a man being informed of the safe delivery of some Chinese silk.

‘Congratulations!’ added Papadakis. ‘Mother and baby are both well, so I’ll be leaving now.’

It was almost three and the doctor was anxious to be on his way. He always hoped to have Saturdays free, and certainly did not want to miss the recital that was being given that afternoon by a visiting French pianist. It was an all-Chopin programme and Thessaloniki society was buzzing with excitement.

‘I’ll come by and see them next week, but let me know if you need me before then, Kyrios Komninos,’ he said with his automatic smile.

The two men shook hands and before the doctor had let himself out of the house, Komninos was already halfway up the sweeping staircase. It was time to see his son for himself.

By now Pavlina had helped Olga wash and had freshly braided her hair. Clean sheets had been put on the bed, and the baby was asleep in the crib beside it. It was a picture of peace and organisation, exactly how Konstantinos liked to see things.

Without even looking at his wife, he walked across the room and gazed down silently at the swaddled newborn.

‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ asked Pavlina.

‘I can’t really see him properly,’ he replied, with a hint of dissatisfaction.

‘You’ll see plenty of him when he wakes up,’ interjected Pavlina.

Komninos gave her a disapproving look.

‘What I mean is, it would be better to let him have his sleep for now. And as soon as he is awake I will bring him to you. It would be better not to disturb him.’

‘Very well, Pavlina,’ he retorted. ‘Could you leave us a moment?’

As soon as Pavlina was out of the room, he looked at Olga.

‘Is he …?’

‘Yes, Konstantinos, he is.’

After all her years of failure to conceive, Olga had known her husband’s greatest fear: that when she finally managed to produce a child, there would be something wrong with it. Her anxiety over what Konstantinos would actually do in those circumstances could now be put to one side.

‘He’s absolutely perfect,’ she said simply.

Satisfied, Komninos left the room. He had business to attend to.

O
N THE SAME
sweltering Saturday afternoon, perhaps even at the very moment when little Dimitri Komninos emerged into the world, a woman began to cook her family’s meagre dinner. She lived in a very different kind of house from the Komninos mansion. Like hundreds of others, her home was in a densely populated quarter, just within the old city walls, in the north-west of the city. It was where the poorest people of Thessaloniki lived: Christians, Muslims, Jews and refugees, crowded on top of each other in streets where there was little money, but plenty of life.

Some of these dwellings were built into the city walls themselves, and the space between them was hardly enough to hang out a single shirt for drying. Families were large, money was scarce and work not always easy to find, and in this home there were four almost grown up, but not yet married, children. Such a number was typical. The mother worked full time to keep her small tribe fed and clean, and when there was no cooking pot on the fire, there was a cauldron of hot water. There was a constant need for it, for washing the filthy clothes and bodies after each day’s work at the port.

The three sons slept in the main living room, while she and her husband occupied the only bedroom, along with their sixteen-year-old daughter, who slept on a couch at the end of the bed. There was no other reasonable arrangement until she could be married, which was highly improbable for a girl with no prospect of a dowry.

The mistress of the house bought wisely and never indulgently, purchasing most of her ingredients from the vendors who came in from the countryside with their baskets of onions, potatoes and beans. Meat was a luxury eaten only on special feast days, but often there were sheeps’ entrails to float in the soup, given away by the butchers if they were unsold at the end of a day. That afternoon there was such a soup simmering, which they would eat later with chunks of coarse bread that her husband had been told to fetch on his way home. Sweat ran down her bare, muscular arms as she stoked the flames beneath the simmering pot. At the end of every Saturday, the men of the family met up with cousins and nephews in a smoke-filled kafenion to drink and chew over the week’s events. With war raging all around them, in Europe and beyond, there was always plenty to discuss.

The family kept an old mule in the lower ground floor of the house, along with a goat to make them self-sufficient in milk and cheese and, as well as a thousand uninvited flies, a few chickens shared the sordid living space, making their nesting places in the soiled hay. They knew to keep well clear of the mule’s hind legs and instead picked at scraps between the goat’s cloven hoofs. When the kitchen was not full of cooking smells, the odour of animal dung pervaded instead.

It was into this dark and fetid space that a small spark from the fire found its way that afternoon. A thousand times before, an ember such as this had been spat out by the crackling wood and then floated slowly down to the floor, where it glowed for a moment and then died. This one, however, flew with the accuracy of a well-aimed arrow through the narrow space between the floorboards and in its trajectory seemed to pick up heat from its own gathering speed.

It dropped onto the mule’s rump, where it was instantly flicked off by its tail. Had the rhythm of the animal’s continuously swishing tail wafted the ember to the left, it would have landed on the damp urine-soaked floor. Instead, it travelled to the right and landed on the straw bedding. It did not stay on the surface, but slipped a few layers down, close to where the hen sat incubating her eggs and creating the perfect conditions to nurture the warmth of the still glowing spark.