The Thread (12 page)

Not so long ago, her mother had sat her down and said, ‘You must be brave, my little one.’

She remembered that her mother had been weeping herself at the time, so Katerina felt it was for her sake that she must refrain from crying too.

‘Your father won’t be coming back from the war. He was very courageous and died saving someone else.’

Katerina had felt proud of her father and, even at her young age, she knew how to bury her sadness and to make sure that it did not make anyone else feel unhappy too.

When they reached the camp where tens of thousands of others had already settled, her confidence returned and she began to ask questions of Kyria Eugenia.

‘Where have they brought us? Why are we here? Are we going to see my mother?’

‘Well, Katerina,’ she said, in her gentlest voice, ‘we’re on an island called Mytilini now. But I am sure they will try to find—’

‘But my mother wanted to go to Athens!’ the little girl said with alarm. ‘Is it far away?’

‘It’s not such a big distance from here,’ Eugenia replied reassuringly, squeezing her hand.

There was no point in telling the child the truth. Those who had been in charge of organising the evacuation from Smyrna were interested only in shifting the huge number of people to safety. Getting them away from the flames and the vengeful Turks had been their priority, not keeping records of who went where and with whom. There were a million or more people on the move and the chances of tracing Katerina’s mother were virtually non-existent.

‘I’m sure we’ll find her later on, my sweetness.’

‘I’m hungry,’ whined Sofia, passing a queue for soup. ‘Can’t we have something to eat?’

‘Let’s find somewhere to sleep first and then we’ll get something,’ answered her mother. She could see from the sheer volume of humanity milling around that only a percentage of the refugees would be sleeping under canvas that night. There was not enough accommodation for them all.

For several hours they waited patiently for a tent to be allocated to them, and all the while Katerina’s eyes darted left and right, eagerly hoping for a glimpse of her mother. No one told her that Mytilini was nearly two hundred and fifty kilometres from Athens.

Once in their tent, Sofia continued to whine. Though they looked the same, Katerina was already noticing that the twins were very different in other ways.

While they were still on the boat, Sofia had proudly told her that she had ‘come out first’. Maria had protested that it was only by a matter of minutes, but clearly her earlier emergence into the world had given Sofia the confidence that made her the leader of the two. Her twin, Maria, was her reflection. Like an echo she often repeated Sofia’s views rather than having her own and she was certainly the gentler of the two.

Eventually, the exhausted trio of children lay down on a straw mattress and sank into a deep slumber, their hunger forgotten.

Eugenia stood outside and looked up and down the row of tents. Most of these refugees had lost every possession they owned, as well as members of their family. Many of them were in a trance-like state, as though sleepwalking, their lined faces without expression. When she saw one of the occupants emerging from the adjacent tent, she greeted her. Living less than a metre from each other, with nothing more than thin canvas to divide them, this woman was now her close neighbour but she gave not even the slightest acknowledgement that Eugenia was there.

Almost immediately, Eugenia understood why. Wrapped within the folds of her voluminous dress, typical of the style worn by the more rural Pontic Greeks, the woman held a sick child. Eugenia noticed that she was weeping, but the child itself was limp and silent.

The woman drew her headscarf across her face and hastened away without meeting Eugenia’s eye. Dysentery. There had been rumours in the accommodation queue that it was wiping out hundreds of people every day and a knot of fear tightened in Eugenia’s stomach. She hoped they would be out of this place soon.

The girls woke up to a feast of bread, tomatoes and milk. It was more than a day since they had eaten. The twins had quickly accepted that Katerina was part of yet another change in their lives. In the past few months, everything had altered so dramatically that having an additional person with them seemed a small detail.

As soon as they had eaten, Eugenia took Katerina to the first aid-post. The nurse carefully removed the ‘bandage’ that had been protecting her arm. Beneath it, the flesh was raw from shoulder to elbow.

‘We’d better get this cleaned up and dressed straightaway,’ she said, with no attempt to conceal her surprise at the extent of the wound. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes, but I try not to think about it,’ answered the little girl.

Katerina winced as the nurse applied ointment, but within moments, the stinging flesh was hidden away beneath a gleaming bandage and the little girl looked down proudly at the flawlessly bound arm.

‘Bring her back to see me in four days’ time,’ the nurse told Eugenia. ‘I want to make sure it’s still clean. There are enough bacteria around here to wipe out the whole lot of us in the blink of an eye …’

Eugenia took Katerina’s hand and led her quickly out of the tent. She was angry with the nurse for saying such things in front of a child.

The two of them walked along the narrow ‘streets’ of the refugee camp, working their way towards the row where the twins awaited their return. Suddenly Katerina remembered something. The sleeve.

‘Kyria Eugenia! We’ve got to go back! Please! I left something there.’

The anguish in the child’s voice gave her no option. Within minutes, pulling on Eugenia’s hand, Katerina had dragged her back to the medical tent. The little girl went straight up to the nurse, who was attending an injured woman.

‘Do you still have my old bandage?’

The nurse paused in her work and gave the child a withering look.

Katerina looked around. The floor had been swept and she spotted a pile of debris by the tent flap.

‘It’s there!’ she said triumphantly, running over to pick it up.

‘But, Katerina, it’s filthy. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it behind?’ pleaded Eugenia, mindful of what the nurse had said about the virulent bacteria rampaging through the camp.

‘But I promised …’ She held on to it tightly.

Eugenia knew how stubborn little girls could be and she could see the determination on Katerina’s face.

‘Very well, but we will have to give it a good wash as soon as we can.’

Before they left the tent, Eugenia noted the look of disgust on the nurse’s face. There seemed no harm in keeping a child happy in these circumstances, she mused to herself. Katerina’s contented expression showed how much it meant to her to have retrieved the rag.

‘I promised to give it back to the soldier,’ she explained. ‘It’s still got one of his buttons.’

Eugenia took a closer look and sure enough there was a button still attached to it. It was tarnished, but there it was, still hanging by a thread.

Katerina put it away in her pocket and they returned to their tent to find the twins.

The task of tracking down her mother still preoccupied Katerina, and she and Eugenia spent many hours walking up and down rows of makeshift tents to see if they could find her. Many of the families they met were Pontic Greeks, like Eugenia and her daughters – people who had lived near the Black Sea – and Eugenia even found some from her village near Trebizond. In the one-thousand-kilometre flight from their homes to Smyrna, families and friends had become separated and she was overjoyed to re-establish contact with some people she knew.

Katerina did not see one familiar face from Smyrna and the camp organisers confirmed to Eugenia that no one named Zenia Sarafoglou had registered with them.

Silently, Eugenia accepted that she might need to keep Katerina with her. All around there were similar situations and depleted families were being formed into new shapes by loss and adoption. Maria and Sofia were beginning to regard the newcomer as a permanent sister. Like many nine-year-old girls, they had strong maternal instincts. Until now, they had shared a single doll between them, but now they had a bigger than life-size version. Katerina basked in their attention and even allowed them to rebandage her arm whenever it was necessary. It was beginning to heal, but the arm would be badly scarred.

The mild October weather encouraged them to play outside for most of the day, and with plenty of children all around, the three girls made new friends. But as weeks turned into months, and the temperatures dropped, they retreated more and more into their tents. Among the possessions she had carried with her across the plains of Asia Minor, Eugenia had brought some of her embroidery silks and some wool left over from a rug she had been weaving. Under her guidance, the girls began to fill their days making patchwork blankets from scraps of material they found in the camp. Sometimes there was a delivery of old clothes from a philanthropic organisation in America and they would be given something ‘new’ to wear, which could be embellished with colourful stitching, appliqué and plenty of imagination. On one particular day, in a moment of boredom, Maria had pushed her needle through the canvas of the tent-flap and soon they had covered their ‘door’ with stitches, ‘writing’ their names in red, green and blue and decorating them with flowers and leaves.

For a final flourish, Eugenia traced the words ‘
Spiti mou, spitaki mou
’ in large stitches. This was what the tent had become: ‘Home Sweet Home’.

For the children at least, the traumatic departure from their homes began to fade in their memories and dreams became sweet once more.

Even though the efforts of the adults to keep the children happy were largely successful, they were all too aware of the ever-deteriorating conditions of the camp and were growing weary of the stultifying inactivity.

Eugenia knew that their old life in Asia Minor could never be recovered, but she could not begin to contemplate the thought of a permanent life in Mytilini’s unfriendly landscape. They were playing a waiting game. Many had died of disease in the camp and there was always the possibility that it would be their turn next. What an irony, thought Eugenia, to have survived such hardships to reach Smyrna and then to die here.

There was enough food but winter was beginning to bite, with plummeting temperatures and torrential rainfall.

Rumours began to reach them that diplomatic efforts were being made to resolve their situation. That at least was a comfort. Even if time had no real meaning for the children, most adults felt the relentless passage of the days and wondered how much of their lives were to be squandered in this place.

One day they heard the welcome news that they were all to be taken to the mainland. Though the numbers were massively imbalanced, there was to be an official exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.

After the catastrophic wars of hatred and violence of recent years, the politicians considered this the only solution. Muslims could no longer live in safety in Greece, and the Greeks could no longer live comfortably with the Muslims in Turkey. With its vast land mass and large population, the exchange would make relatively little impact on Turkey, but it would change Greece beyond recognition, swelling the number of people living in the small, underresourced nation from four and a half million to six million in a matter of months. The effect of increasing the population by twenty-five per cent would be particularly dramatic since the majority of the newcomers would arrive with little more than the clothes they stood in.

In January 1923 a convention was drawn up in Lausanne. Within a year this unprecedented migration of populations from one country to another would be complete.

T
HROUGHOUT THE SPRING
, there was great anticipation in the camp before arrangements for departure were finalised. Katerina overheard one conversation after another about where they might go and a single word kept spinning round and round in her head: Athinathinathinathina. It was the last word she had heard her mother say: ‘
Athina
’. Athens.

Katerina was excited at the renewed prospect of finding her mother and sister, and began to count the days. Each day she put one small cross-stitch on the hem of her dress. Before she had sewn all the way around, she hoped to be with her once again.

The adults seemed excited at the prospect of going. Homes were promised there and Katerina was sure that this was where she would be reunited with her family.

Finally, a huge ship docked in Mytilini and everyone waited to hear whether they were included on the passenger list. As soon as she had confirmation, Eugenia and the girls began to pack up.

Many more families had flooded into the camp in the past few months and conditions had deteriorated badly. With the rising spring temperatures, disease spread rapidly and healthy children were often snatched away from their despairing parents in a matter of hours.

As Eugenia and the girls gathered their possessions, they were not sorry to be leaving. The embroidered tent-flap, now adorned with flowers and foliage around the words ‘Home Sweet Home’, seemed less appropriate now.

Down at the dock, there was plenty of noise and bustle. It was like a large-scale excursion with the atmosphere of a
panegyri
, a saint’s day feast, and for the first time they felt the warmth of the spring sunshine on their faces.

Friends who were already on board called out and waved. They were thrilled to be on the move, and full of excitement and anticipation. At last, there was the possibility of a new life, with all the opportunities that Athens promised.

With one twin on each side of her, Katerina stood behind Eugenia. They were right at the front of the line now, and the grubby odours of diesel fumes and engine oil could not have smelled sweeter.

Eugenia looked up; one of their neighbours from the tented ‘street’ waved and called out from the upper deck. Passengers were crammed onto the boat, and the familiar face soon disappeared into the crowd that surged around her. The boat was packed on every level.