The Thread (11 page)

‘We have to try and get out,’ said Leonidas to his men. He felt that he had already failed them, by being left stranded in this city.

‘We’re an easy target like this, aren’t we?’ said one of the youngest recruits, plucking at his army shirt.

‘Nobody is safe from the Turks,’ answered his captain. ‘But it would probably be safest if we separate and take different routes to the harbour. It will make us less obvious.’

‘Where will we meet?’

‘Just get any boat you can. And we’ll see each other again in Thessaloniki.’

After two years of being in each other’s company it was a perfunctory parting, but each of them had to look out for himself now. Leonidas watched the tattered remains of his regiment join the human flow that surged down towards the sea. Soon they became indistinguishable from the rest.

Before following, Leonidas looked behind him. Columns of fire and smoke plumed high into the air. The ground where he stood was suddenly rocked by an explosion and then he heard the crash of a collapsing building, the sound of shattering glass, the thud of falling masonry. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he sensed that time was running out to escape from this flaming city.

Down at the port, both residents and refugees were fighting for places on any boat they could. What had begun in an orderly fashion, with people quietly queuing and hopeful for a place, had descended into chaos. With the city on fire and atrocities being perpetrated just a few hundred metres away, panic was taking hold. The temperature of fear increased with every person who arrived to join the crowd, which was now enclosed in a space just one kilometre wide and a few hundred metres deep. It was a catastrophe.

Alone and unencumbered by possessions, Leonidas was able to manoeuvre himself towards the centre of the crowd. He could see small boats piled high with chairs, mattresses and trunks being rowed out to sea. Other vessels meant for one man and his fishing nets had twenty people on board. There was the sound of splashing as people threw themselves into the sea, intent on swimming out to one of the Italian boats to plead for refuge. Occasionally there was the sound of gunfire as a swimmer was picked off by a Turkish sniper.

Leonidas felt a wave of shame. Every Greek killed was revenge for a dead Turk. What a pointless game of numbers it seemed to have become. Death for the man he saw vanishing beneath the surface of the water was speedy but he knew there had been times when he and his men had ensured that a victim’s suffering was long and painful before they allowed him his final gasp.

Flashes of the shame and horror of the past few months had haunted his dreams, but now plagued his every waking moment too. He turned away from the water and pushed against the tide of people to find his way to the back of the crowd. His eyes were stinging with tears from the smoke but sobs came from deep within. He could not leave. With all the crimes that weighed on his conscience, how could he could push in front of any other man, woman or child? There was not one person here who did not deserve to live more than he. In all those months of the campaign, the soldiers had been swept along on a tide of hatred and self-justification, but now it was self-loathing that tore at his heart. Base acts of animal violence swam in front of his eyes, one after another, then another and another …The harbour of Smyrna had disappeared for him and in its place were dark images from the past weeks.

Anyone not entirely preoccupied by their own plans for escape would have noticed a skeletal, sunburned soldier walking as though in a trance away from the sea. His ragged hair was white with dust, and tears ran between the deep crevices of his prematurely aged and wrinkled skin.

Coming in the other direction, was the woman with her two girls in their embroidered frocks. She was desperate for places for herself and her daughters. ‘
Athina
?’ she asked repeatedly, as she followed directions towards the queue for a ship to Piraeus, the closest port to Athens. Her politeness and her elegance were a passport through the crowd and people parted to let her and her infants through. The baby’s pitiful cries were enough to arouse sympathy in even the hardest heart.

As the woman continued on her way, a building went up in flames close by and sparks flew. She was only metres from the front of the queue.

At that moment, a glowing ember dropped onto the little girl’s sleeve. The fabric immediately melted away, burning the skin beneath, and she shrieked in pain, pulling away from her mother to extinguish the flame. Meanwhile, her mother was being relentlessly swept forward, and in the next moment had been ushered onto a small boat. It would take her to the Piraeus-bound ship that was safely anchored some distance away.

Realising that her daughter was not with her, the woman began to scream.

‘Where’s my Katerina? Where’s my little girl? Katerina! Katerina! Katerina! My little one!’

She clamoured to be allowed off but her desperate attempts to stand up caused the little vessel to rock precariously and her panic was clearly putting everyone in danger.

‘People are fighting to get
on
these boats, not off!’ insisted a burly man, grabbing her wrists and pulling her down. ‘Now just bloody well sit down so we can get out of here! Someone else will bring your kid.’

A wall of people now stood between the five-year-old and the water, obscuring the sight and sound of her sobbing mother.

The little girl was preternaturally calm. This was her home city and she was certain to find someone to help her. Surrounded by the maelstrom of shouting, fear and burning, she wandered away from the port. The agony of her raw skin now began to torment her.

Meanwhile, Leonidas continued to meander blindly away from the crowds. There was an intense throbbing inside his head, as though the screams around him were within his skull. He sank down in a doorway and buried his head in his hands, wanting to block out the chaos around him.

Eventually he looked up, as if he could feel the child’s eyes on him. In her white dress, she looked like an angel without wings, and behind her pale silhouette the distant fire surrounded her with a supernatural glow. She was a fairy, a spirit, but she was crying.

This vision stirred him to action and he stood up.

This little angel made him feel brave. He saw that she was clutching her arm.

‘It hurts,’ she said, bravely.

‘Let me look.’

The vulnerable patch of raw skin needed protection and, without a moment’s hesitation, he ripped off his shirtsleeve.

‘You must get it bandaged up properly, but this will do for now,’ he said, tying the fabric round her arm. The heavy cotton khaki looked incongruous next to the fine white muslin, which he noticed was embroidered with delicate flowers.

‘So where are you going? Why are you wandering about alone?’

‘My mother and sister have gone …’ she turned and pointed towards the sea, ‘… on a boat.’

Her innocence was transcendent.

‘We have to get you on a boat, then, don’t we?’

She held her arms out so that he could pick her up and together they went back towards the clamouring crowds.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her. ‘And where do you come from?’

‘I’m Katerina. And I don’t come from anywhere.’

‘You must come from somewhere,’ he teased, happily distracting her with their conversation.

‘I didn’t have to come from somewhere. I was already here.’

‘So this is where you live. In Smyrna?’

‘Yes.’ Almost impossibly, Leonidas found himself smiling. Her childlike detachment from her situation seemed almost mystical. His own despair seemed to lift.

Katerina was weightless in his arms. As light as a fairy, he mused. He had only ever lifted one other child, his nephew, Dimitri, and that was more than a year ago. Even then, Dimitri had been heavier than this little person. In spite of the rank odour of sweat and smoke around him, he could smell that the child who wrapped her arms so tightly round his neck gave off an aroma of clean linen and fresh flowers.

The dense crowd responded to his authoritative voice and what remained of his soldier’s uniform, and parted to let them through. He could feel the crunch of broken glass and had to avoid tripping on all the abandoned domestic objects underfoot. A small child, especially a barefooted child, as so many were, would not have survived for a minute all alone in this chaos.

Leonidas spoke to a woman who seemed in charge of the boats and explained that the child was injured. Soon she was being helped into a boat.

‘Look after my sleeve!’ he shouted cheerily. ‘I’ll need it back!’

‘I promise!’ the little girl called out.

Hers was the first smile he had seen in a year. In all his time in active service, he had rarely seen such stoicism.

Leonidas waved until she was a speck on the horizon. Then he headed back to the flaming ruins of the city.

A
S EACH STROKE
of the oars took them closer to the big ship anchored out in the bay, Katerina grew excited at the thought of seeing her mother. When they drew up alongside, she grasped the metal steps and began to climb. Her arm was throbbing and when strange hands reached down towards her and lifted her onto the deck she winced with pain as one of them touched her arm. A well-meaning woman patted her on the head, gave her a piece of bread and a cup of water and settled her onto a bench. The ship was crammed full of women and children. Husbands and fathers were away in the army and thousands of them had died in recent months. Almost all of these women were widows.

‘Are you alone?’ enquired a woman who seemed to be in charge.

‘My mother’s here,’ Katerina replied. ‘But I don’t know where.’

‘Shall we go for a walk then, and see if we can find her?’

She took Katerina’s hand and together they walked the length and breadth of the ship. Many people were in great distress. Some were wounded, others rocked back and forth, traumatised by the events of the past twenty-four hours.

Katerina’s grip on the woman’s hand tightened.

‘Can you tell me what she looks like?’ the woman asked. ‘What was she wearing?’

‘She had on a dress like mine,’ answered Katerina with certainty. ‘When she makes a dress for herself she always makes one for me that’s the same.’

‘It’s a very pretty dress, then!’ she said smiling. Although the little girl’s dress was grubby, she could see it had once been beautiful. It was covered with embroidered daisies and edged with lace but now, rather incongruously, one of the sleeves appeared to have been made out of a different fabric.

‘But what have you done to your arm?’

‘It caught fire,’ answered Katerina.

‘Oh dear! Well, as soon as we’ve found your mother, we’ll have it looked at,’ continued the woman with a concerned voice. ‘Now, can you see her on deck? If not, I’m sure she will be inside.’

‘She’s with a baby,’ Katerina said chattily, ‘who’s only a few months old.’

It was beginning to dawn on the woman that this search might be fruitless, so she tried to distract Katerina with conversation, asking her questions about her sibling, whether it was a boy or a girl, her name and so on. After a twenty-minute search, it was becoming obvious to the woman that the mother was not going to be found. She was loath to crush the child’s cheerful spirit, but sooner or later she would have to tell her that they had run out of possibilities. Her mother was not on this boat.

‘I am sure we will find her, but for a little while we’ll have to ask someone else to look after you …’

Another rowing boat had arrived to offload its human cargo onto the ship. There was precious little space left and the woman who was helping to arrange the evacuation looked over anxiously.

‘Excuse me!’ she said to a woman who was sitting between two children, on a huge bundle that now contained everything they owned. ‘Would you mind keeping an eye on this little one for a moment?’

The mother held out her hands towards Katerina.

‘Of course, come and sit with us,’ she said kindly. ‘Move up, Maria.’

Katerina heard a slightly strange accent, but it did not make the woman too hard to understand. One of the two children snuggled closer to her mother to make space for Katerina.

‘Make yourself nice and comfy,’ said the mother. ‘I’m Kyria Eugenia and these are my daughters, Maria and Sofia.’

It was dusk. The engines began to throb and the heavy clank of the anchor being pulled up alerted everyone to the ship’s imminent departure. Katerina’s head lolled onto Maria’s shoulder and with the motion of the ship the three little girls were soon asleep. They were among the last of the two hundred thousand people evacuated from Smyrna in those terrifying few days.

By sunrise, the ship had docked.

The night before, Katerina had been so tired that she had not taken in that the two girls she was now travelling with were identical twins. She looked from one to another and rubbed her eyes, wondering if they were playing tricks on her. Both of them giggled. They were well accustomed to such a reaction and played on their uncanny similarity.

‘Who is who?’ asked Sofia.

‘You’re Maria!’ answered Katerina.

‘Wrong!’ cried Sofia with delight. ‘Now hide your eyes!’

Katerina did what she was told and when Sofia shouted ‘Ready!’ she opened them.

‘What’s my name?’ asked Sofia.

‘Maria!’

‘Wrong again!’

She had never seen such similitude. To the millimetre their hair was cut the same length and their red dresses were indistinguishable from each other. Even the freckles on their noses matched. It was an hour or so before they were all allowed to disembark, and during that time they played lots of games with Katerina, all based on their similarity. By the time they were allowed onto land, they were firm friends. The three of them followed Eugenia down the gangplank, holding hands like paper dolls.

A soldier threw Eugenia’s bundle into a waiting truck and they climbed in after it.

‘Where are we going?’ Katerina heard Kyria Eugenia ask, but the soldier’s response was inaudible. They were somewhere she did not recognise and, for the first time since their parting, the certainty that her mother was close by left her. It already seemed a very long time since she had seen her. Was it a day? A week? A month? She sank back against some crates, pulled her knees in towards herself and cried quietly so that no one would notice. She knew this was the best way.