The Thread (13 page)

The uniformed official began to draw the barrier across.

‘I’m sorry. It’s full. In fact, it’s overfull, Kyria. They have given passage to one hundred more people than this old crate should take.’

‘But surely it can take another four! What difference will it make?’

‘You will have to wait for the next one.’

‘But when will that be?’ protested Eugenia, trying to hold back her tears.

‘We’re expecting another one. I can’t say when. But everyone here will be moved off the island in due course,’ the official replied in the polite, dispassionate tone of one who would return to his own bed that night.

The only way in which the man’s own life had been affected by these events had been the increase in his salary. He had made a killing in the past few days, accepting bribes from those who could afford a payment to get to the top of the list.

They watched with dismay as the boat pulled out of the harbour and Eugenia saw the faces of her friends diminish to invisibility. The official stood with his back to them, as though he wished to block the view of her vanishing hopes.

She dropped her bundle of possessions down in front of her, almost on the official’s feet.

‘We will sit here, then,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll be at the front of the queue.’

‘Be my guests,’ he said superciliously, and walked away.

Less than an hour later, a second boat was spotted on the horizon. After what seemed a painfully long time, the ship docked and once again, the tedious process of registration had to be gone through. Eugenia sent the three girls off to see if they could find something to eat and gave the names of herself and the children to a new official. The previous one had disappeared and this new one seemed more sympathetic.

‘How long will it take to get to Athens?’ she asked him.

‘You aren’t going to Athens,’ he replied matter-of-factly, without even glancing up from the form he was filling out with Eugenia’s details. ‘You’re going to Thessaloniki.’

‘Thessaloniki!’ Eugenia felt a surge of panic. ‘But we don’t want to go to Thessaloniki! We know nobody in Thessaloniki. All the people from my village have gone to Athens!’

‘Well, it’s up to you. There are plenty of people in the queue right behind you who would be happy to take your places on this boat. And I can’t keep them all waiting.’

Eugenia made one last plea: ‘But Katerina is not my daughter. And her mother is in Athens! We need to get her there.’

The official was unimpressed. Such separations and misplacements were a common occurrence at these times.

‘Well, there is no boat going to Athens, but there is one going to Thessaloniki.’

‘When will there be one for Athens?’

‘I have no idea and nor does anyone else. Look, Kyria, this is not a pleasure excursion so you’d be wise to make up your mind sooner rather than later about whether you want your names on the passenger list.’ He moved her form to one side of his desk. ‘If you’ll just step to one side now …’ he added impatiently. ‘There are hundreds of people behind you who don’t look as if they will be so particular about where they are going.’

Eugenia watched as the breeze lifted the edge of paper. A strong gust of this wind, and her entitlement to a place on the ship could be floating away.

She had less than a second to decide. Though Athens was the destination of all their fellow villagers, Thessaloniki was closer; but the one really decisive factor was that there were no other guaranteed options.

‘We’ll go!’ she said, slapping her hand down on the form. ‘Please. We’ll take these places.’

‘Very well,’ the official responded. ‘Could you sign your name here, confirming you are mother to the two girls and … here, confirming you are responsible for the third?’

Eugenia did not hesitate now and wrote her name, clumsily, on the two lines. She had never doubted, even for a moment, that she should look after Katerina until the child’s mother was found. Nothing had seemed more natural. From the moment when this bonny child in her torn white dress had been given to her on the boat from Smyrna she had loved her as her own. If the misfortunes of conflict against the Turks had not taken her husband away – he was officially missing – she would probably have had several more children. Perhaps this was why she had welcomed this ‘addition’ to her family with such a ready embrace.

The four of them were the first on board, so it seemed like many hours later that the ship was finally full and ready to leave. There was the clank of chains and the children, who had been running up and down on deck, excited at the thought of the new journey, returned to Eugenia.

She did not tell them where they were going. Her daughters would be distressed that they were not going to join their old friends, and Katerina would know that her mother would not be waiting at the end of their journey. In other ways, perhaps none of them would ever know the difference between Athens and Thessaloniki.

The boat drifted through the night, the waters illuminated by a full moon. The children slept soundly. Their possessions became their pillows and the blankets they had been given in the camp protected them from the salty breeze.

Eugenia lay awake all night listening to the sounds of the sick, hoping that her girls would escape illness. A few people had boarded the boat with dysentery and were now in the grip of fever, and five or six times someone stepped over her legs carrying a sick or even lifeless body. They were trying to put those who were ill in one area of the boat as it was the only way of reducing the possibility of an epidemic. Sound carried in the stillness and Eugenia could hear the constant murmur of the two priests on board as they comforted the dying or quietly chanted the words of the funeral oration. Several times, she heard the distinctive dull ‘splash’ of a corpse being thrown overboard.

She watched over the trio of children, studying their wisps of dark silky hair, the unblemished skin of their foreheads and the long lashes that brushed their cheeks. The three innocents who slept so peacefully beside her seemed luminescent in the moonlight. They had done no more to bring misfortune on themselves than the angels they resembled. Even a moment of misery was more than they deserved.

She prayed to the
Panagia
to protect them all and whether or not the Virgin heard, the boat continued inexorably across the inky sea.

As she gazed at them, Eugenia’s eyelids became heavy. By the time the coastline of the Greek mainland began to take shape in the distance, she was sound asleep. When she awoke they would be in a new country, and a new life would be about to begin.

F
OR KONSTANTINOS KOMNINOS
that May morning was like most others. He rose at six and prepared himself for the day’s work. His warehouse and showroom had reopened two years previously and he was already in the process of expanding into a third building. Although many businesses had never recovered from the fire, Konstantinos had used the destruction of the premises built by his father to create something bigger and stronger and more of his own making. He had contested his insurer’s inability to pay and had won the case, so the opportunity for him to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the city had been his. In addition, the prolonged period of mobilisation of the army, and the continuing conflict in Asia Minor, had provided him with unparalleled commercial opportunity.

War had given but it had also taken.

At the end of October, he had received notification that his brother was missing. Leonidas had reached the outskirts of Smyrna following his regiment’s retreat across Asia Minor but after that nothing had been heard of him. According to some who had managed to survive, the majority of the soldiers in Leonidas Komninos’ regiment had been cut down and massacred.

Reconstructing the premises and making business improvements had taken priority over the rebuilding of Konstantinos’ seafront mansion, and although the latter had been started, it was an undertaking to which he gave less time. The entire house had to be demolished before it was rebuilt. The only parts of the original that could be reused were the foundations themselves.

While Olga and little Dimitri Komninos had continued to live in Irini Street, Konstantinos had stayed in a hotel. He rarely got home from his office until midnight, so it was a valid excuse that he did not want to disturb the sleeping household.

Olga loved life in the old town with its constant activity, and was in no hurry to move her happy and contented child elsewhere, but the dramatic changes brought about by the exchange of populations had already begun to transform the city. Even Irini Street was about to be affected.

The Ekrem family were shortly to move out. For several weeks they had prepared for departure, packing their belongings, saying goodbye to their beloved friends and giving small presents to the people they had come to love in this street. They were promised some compensation for the home they were obliged to leave, and a new place to live in Asia Minor, but it was somewhere completely foreign and strange to them and they had no desire to rip themselves from their happy life in Thessaloniki.

The night before they left, the Ekrems were invited in by the Morenos for a farewell meal and brought with them as a gift a treasured volume of poems by Ibn Zamrak, whose work was carved onto the walls of the Alhambra Palace.

The two families were all agreed: they had so many things in common. Expulsion from Spain was just one of them.

‘“
Granada!
Ever the home of peace and fondest hope. Just being there is both desire and satisfaction”,’ translated one of the Ekrem girls.

‘You never know what life will bring, do you?’ said Kyria Ekrem in her broken Greek.

‘When that was written no one had the remotest idea that all the Arabs were going to be chased out, I suppose,’ said Saul wryly.

That morning, Olga had risen early to say her final goodbye. If Komninos had passed by on the way to the barber he would have been appalled to see his wife’s sentimentality over the departure of some Muslims. He had never understood why she had been so friendly with the Ekrems.

By seven o’clock, he had already visited his barber for a close shave and by seven forty-five, his shoe-shine ‘boy’ had received his daily tip. At seven fifty he was seated in the kafenion close to his new offices by the docks, and by eight o’clock he was on his second coffee, having scanned three of the city’s many dozens of newspapers. Now he ran his eye over the financial pages and assessed the approximate value of his stocks and shares.

Availability and demand for wool were dependent on many factors over which he had no control, but there was a skill in predicting when to buy and from where. It was the same with other fabrics, and for those he had to be in tune with what was considered ‘
à la mode
’, not just currently but for the future, both in fashion and in furnishings. Whether or not they were aware of it, the majority of the well-heeled citizens of Thessaloniki were clothed and their houses ‘draped’ by Konstantinos Komninos.

The politics of his country, and this city in particular, had preoccupied Konstantinos more than ever during these past few months. A million Asia Minor Greeks had arrived in Greece even before the final treaty with Turkey, due to be signed in July, and each day more came.

Different statistics had been floating about for months but all of them caused alarm. For many months, refugees had been streaming into Thessaloniki and how to feed and accommodate them was a major cause of anxiety. The newspapers had been happy to stir up discontent. ‘
MORE THAN A MILLION
,’ shrieked the headline of one. ‘
THESSALONIKI TO BE SWAMPED
,’ predicted another. ‘
WHERE WILL WE PUT THEM
?’ another one asked, when the news came that one hundred thousand refugees were to be settled in Thessaloniki itself.

Like many of the affluent citizens of Thessaloniki, Konstantinos Komninos was watching the effects of this huge influx of destitute refugees with great concern. There were many who had been living in shacks or sharing their homes since the fire, and even his own family was not properly housed.

He was not the only merchant to start each day in this kafenion. He shared the habit with one of the most successful tailors in the region, Grigoris Gourgouris. They each occupied their usual tables, both of them smoked the same brand of cigarette and both read the same right-wing newspapers. Although their acquaintanceship went back thirty years, their relationship rarely strayed beyond the impersonal world of commerce. Gourgouris bought most of his fabrics from Komninos but, in spite of their interdependence, they nurtured a healthy dose of distrust of each other, based on the notion that the other was usually getting the better deal.

‘As far as I am concerned, we shouldn’t have allowed so many of them through here. They should have gone straight to Piraeus,’ hollered Gourgouris across the room, his double chin wobbling as it always did when his passions were aroused.

‘There should be a little more space to breathe quite soon,’ commented Komninos phlegmatically, without glancing up from his newspaper, ‘when all the Muslims have gone.’

‘Personally, I shan’t be sorry to see those fezzes disappear off the streets,’ said Gourgouris. ‘But the numbers are hardly going to balance, are they? We’re gaining more than we are losing.’

‘But think of it, Grigoris! With a new wave of Christians coming into this city, there’ll be more suits needed to put on their backs! So it won’t be all bad …’

They both laughed and then Komninos tossed a few coins on the table and got up to leave. It was eight o’clock and he had work to do.

Touching the brim of his hat, he said a curt ‘Good morning’ to his customer and went out into the morning sunshine.

He strolled down towards the docks. He was expecting a shipment in that day and hoped for news on what time the boat was going to arrive. There were always dozens of waifs hanging around in the dockland areas, some of them looking for work, some begging, some simply hanging around idle, staying close to their bundles of possessions, which they had left in doorways. Komninos never dipped his hand into his pocket. It was his rule. Once you gave to one, all the others would come running. His tactic was to look right through them, to treat them as though they were not there.