The Thread (20 page)

Life in the opera house, according to these letters, was vibrant, sociable and comfortably cushioned. Enthralled, Katerina listened to her mother’s descriptions of this palace that was inhabited by ordinary people who had been invited in by a benign but outsized monarch. The image of the colossal cauldrons from which their meals were ladled completed this picture of a life lived under the friendly patronage of an invisible giant. Not once did Zenia mention the squalid reality.

‘Of course, we are not inside our Opera House all day. Sometimes we go out into the street and explore the city of Athens.’

Zenia also avoided a truthful description of the streets in the overcrowded capital. She was careful to leave out the details of the begging and prostitution, although they would not have been unfamiliar to Katerina. Thessaloniki had many of the same problems. Instead she talked about the big squares and monuments that even children who had been brought up in Smyrna had seen in picture books.

‘Up on a big rock overlooking the city is one of the most ancient and most important buildings in the whole world. It’s called the Parthenon and was once a temple. It was on the cover of a picture book you had when you were little. When the sun sets it is bathed in an amber light and seems to be on fire.’

Katerina sat at the little table around which everything in this house revolved and savoured every word. Sometimes the voice seemed so close, it was as if her mother were speaking. At other times it was like listening to such distant music, she had to strain to catch its notes.

The correspondence was peppered with names of people from Smryna and Katerina had a vague recollection of a few of them. Within the story of Zenia’s current life, they became familiar once again.

After the first dozen or so relentlessly cheerful letters, which were written in the months immediately following their departure from Smyrna, there was a break in the correspondence.

Following that hiatus, the letters described a new ‘village’ that they had moved to. Zenia admitted that they were all happy in the end to move out of the giant’s home.

‘He allowed it to become too crowded,’ she wrote, ‘and a new place has been constructed for us, with much more space. It’s like a normal village, with streets of small houses. We have to share with a mother and her daughter but our girls are getting along reasonably well with each other.’

Eugenia picked up the nuance – that the children played with each other happily and naturally, but the mothers were not sure about each other. Such enforced coexistence was rarely happy for strangers.

One of the very few men in this widow-heavy community asked Zenia to marry him. Angelos Pantazoglou lived in the next-door dwelling with his three children (his wife had died at the birth of the last).

With more than twice as many women as men among the refugees, Zenia knew that this was a unique opportunity to provide her daughters with a father and so, one Friday, for the second time in her life, she drank from the common cup and felt the fleeting touch of the wedding crowns, the
stephana
, on her head. In her letter to Katerina, she described to her daughter the obese priest who wheezed so much that he could scarcely walk the compulsory three laps of the altar.

Letters written less than a year later reported news of a son, ‘a brother for you and your sister,’ she wrote with enthusiasm, ‘and of course your other siblings too.’

Eugenia read the package of letters almost without pause. Its narrative seemed to demand a continuous flow. Katerina did not interrupt once, except when Eugenia repeated the names of her step-siblings and she repeated them back at her: Petros, Froso, Margarita and now, a half-brother, baby Manos.

The letters always ended with the words: ‘If this letter finds you, Katerina, I hope it will bring you to join us. I tell Artemis about you and she asks about you every day. I think it’s hard for her to understand that she has a sister who is not here.’

When Eugenia came to the end of the final letter it was nearly midnight. Usually Katerina would have been asleep by this time but that night she was wide awake, almost beside herself with excitement.

‘We’ve found her!’ she said. ‘I’m going to see my mother again!’

Eugenia forced a smile. Inside she was weeping.

Within days, a postman had found Zenia in Athens and delivered the package of letters from Katerina that she had been writing for years. They did not need to be put in date order, the development of the handwriting from the very early stages to almost adult fluency guided the reader as to which letters came first and which last.

They were full of contented ramblings about her life in Thessaloniki and when Katerina described the woman who had been looking after her all this time, Zenia felt a sudden, urgent pang of jealousy. The feeling recurred each time she saw the name ‘Eugenia’ written on the page; she could not help it.

During the course of the correspondence she came to know the Karayanidis, Komninos and Moreno families and many others who peopled the colourful old street in which they lived. The child’s passion for the vibrant and colourful city of Thessaloniki leaped from every word of every page.

In Katerina’s final and most recent letter she had even enclosed a handkerchief on which her mother’s name was carefully embroidered. Zenia smiled, glad to see that her daughter carried on a family tradition. Her own sewing skills were now confined to putting buttons on cheap shirts, which were then packaged up for a wholesaler and sold to a market stall.

‘Can we write, can we write?’ Katerina nagged for the next few days, excited that she would finally be sending a letter that she knew was going to arrive.

Her letter was a list of questions. She wanted to find out more about her brothers and sisters, how to find the house and when she might come. Eugenia enclosed a letter with Katerina’s, formally introducing herself and asking Zenia what arrangements they should make.

Now that they had the full address, the letter did not take long to reach its destination, and within a few weeks the postman was knocking on the door again in Irini Street.

Zenia had addressed her reply to Eugenia but inside the envelope there were two letters: one for Eugenia and one for Katerina.

Before the child returned from school, Eugenia read hers. Zenia explained the facts of her situation. She now had five children to look after. Her husband gave preferential treatment to the four that were his own, but little Artemis was pushed around not only by her stepfather but by some of the other children too. When Zenia tried to point out this unfairness, she was given a sharp slap. This had begun to leave her bruised but the marks were always under her clothes. Although the walls that separated their flimsy accommodation were thin, there was no interference in such matters between families. Behind their own front door, everyone’s business was considered their own.

I need you to know the truth of my situation, Kyria Karayanidis. Nothing would make me happier than to see Katerina again, but I believe she may have a better future staying in Thessaloniki with you than coming to Athens. I know times are difficult but would you care for her a while longer?

When Katerina came home, her own letter was waiting on the table and she picked it up with great excitement.

‘Will you read it to me?’ she cried. ‘I can’t read her funny writing.’

‘Of course, sweetheart,’ said Eugenia. ‘Let’s sit down.’

She took a deep breath and began.

‘My darling daughter, I was so pleased to receive all your letters. Your life sounds so happy and contented and Thessaloniki must be a wonderful city. Life in Athens is not as easy. We have very little space and it is a struggle to get enough food to feed us all.’

Eugenia paused. She knew what must surely follow.

‘Much as I yearn to see you, I want you to think twice about coming to live with us. Consider what you have in your life now and if what it contains is good, with good people, perhaps that is what you should hold on to. The things you know are sometimes much better than the things you don’t know.’

Eugenia looked up and saw the child’s eyes were full of tears. She also noticed that Katerina was inadvertently stroking her scarred arm, an action that had become automatic whenever she was anxious or upset. Eugenia could feel the writer’s anguish and knew what it was she was trying to say to her child. She pitied them both equally. Katerina was too young for such a choice, but there it was, in black and white, written on the letter that now lay before her.

Even before Eugenia had finished reading, Katerina had realised something herself. She no longer knew which of these two women was really her mother: the woman who had been reading to her or the woman who had been writing to her. She kept this thought inside, but the desire to get to Athens, which she had felt so deeply and for so long, had begun to melt away.

F
OR A WHILE
, sadness was Katerina’s constant companion. It was there waiting for her each morning when she woke and stayed with her all day as she went to and from school and played with her friends. Sometimes it followed her into her dreams and she woke with her face in a pool of tears. She had learned to be brave when she was small, though, and she was determined to shrug off this unwanted friend. Eugenia kept a careful eye on her and after many weeks saw her slowly rediscover her smile.

At around the same time as losing the dream of seeing her mother, she had lost one of her closest companions. Irini Street did not seem the same without Dimitri. Both he and his mother, for different reasons, had not kept their promise to visit.

Dimitri was missing his friends too. His new school took him in a new direction beyond the White Tower and towards the huge mansions on Olga Vasilisis Street. Many had turrets and domes and double-sweeping staircases that presented a choice on how to reach the front door. They had been commissioned by the affluent merchants who wanted to advertise their success, if not their good taste, and made even the Komninos house look modest.

On Sundays, Katerina, Elias, Isaac and the twins would stroll down to the sea, and Dimitri would look out of the huge drawing room windows on the first floor of his house and see them.

‘Can I go out for a while?’ he would ask his mother.

‘As long as you are home for dinner,’ she would answer. ‘Your father is coming back at eight.’

Her husband would often be out during the day at the warehouses or his office. She knew Konstantinos would disapprove, but Olga was happy for Dimitri to take a break from his studying. As well as a dozen other academic subjects, he was learning French, German and English, and his father had great ambitions for his fluency, as long as he worked hard enough.

‘If we are going to take our business forward, Dimitri, those are the languages you have to learn. We are looking towards Europe and America now. Buying from the East and selling to the West. This is where we will make our fortunes.’

Olga sometimes wondered what he meant by that. How much more of a fortune could he possibly want?

In their first days back in the refurbished home, Olga could see how much Dimitri missed the company of his old friends and urged him to see them again. Even if her growing fears were keeping Olga away from Irini Street, she did not want her son to lose touch with his old playmates.

One day he spotted them on the promenade and ran out to find them. Olga watched the group from the balcony.

Looking down at the crowd moving in both directions along the esplanade, she had an overpowering sense of her own solitude. Part of her yearned to be with them. The sight of her son with his friends and a thousand other people milling about in the weekend sunshine, enjoying the intoxicating combination of warmth, breeze and light, was a familiar one. Her sense of being shut, not merely within the walls of the house but inside her own skin, created an invisible barrier that kept them apart.

She was totally unable to leave the house nowadays. In the summer she found the heat oppressive and in the winter the dampness made her bones ache. These were not the only excuses, though. The four walls of her magnificent house were like a cage, within which she was safe. Food was brought to her, clothes were sewn for her, the hairdresser attended to her hair at home and now her son came and went without need for guidance or help. Since returning from Irini Street, the outside world had become a place of irrational fear and a reluctance to leave her home had turned to full-scale terror for Olga.

Konstantinos Komninos was unaffected by his wife’s silent phobia. He often brought significant clients to the house for dinner, and on these occasions Olga was always impeccable, both in appearance and mood. In winter, she wore a tailored dress that showed off the quality of the heavier luxury fabrics in which Komninos specialised, and in the summer, she changed to lighter ones. Sometimes, if the client was very important, a tailor would be commissioned to make something bespoke for the occasion. For example, when a French couturier visited, Olga greeted him in an outfit of red, white and blue. Dimitri even appeared that night to recite a French poem.

Olga stopped watching when the children disappeared from sight. She imagined them eating sweet
trigona
pastries with their fingers and sipping lemonade purchased from the street vendor, just as she had done when she was a child. She closed the shutters and retreated inside the darkened room to rest. In due course, Dimitri would return, his face flushed with sunshine and laughter.

Isaac always made sure that the girls were back in good time too. He took responsibility for them all and Eugenia was happy to know that the strong capable boy would make sure they were safe. Sofia and Maria were fourteen now and almost of the age where they should not be out on their own, unaccompanied.

The twins would soon be leaving school and both of them had already declared that they did not want to follow in their mother’s footsteps and become weavers. They wanted to be outside. To their mother’s dismay the twins announced to Eugenia that they wanted to grade tobacco leaves. An agriculturalist had been to the school to start signing up pupils and Sofia and Maria were on his list of recruits.