The Thread (25 page)

It was not only the constant hum of human voices and endless clattering of plates and crockery that disturbed his concentration. As the words of his textbook swam in front of him, he thought of the stories that Katerina had told and remembered her childlike voice, ringing like a bell across the room. It had been so long since he had heard such care-free laughter from his mother. Even if she did not want or need them, he hoped very much that Katerina would be coming to deliver more dresses.

As he struggled to memorise the periodic table, the only thing that seemed to have lodged in his memory was the image of Katerina’s smile.

W
ITHIN THE YEAR
, Dimitri passed his exams and joined the medical faculty at the university. His father was furious. Business these days seemed increasingly to involve contracts and written documentation, so Dimitri’s expertise and qualification in law would have strengthened the business even further. His son’s knowledge of medicine would contribute nothing.

Konstantinos swept his son’s disobedience aside, just as he did most obstacles that came in his path. His great pleasure in life was to overcome challenge, whether in the form of competitors, suppliers or, nowadays, his factory labourers.

He had come through the financial slump of the early thirties, when most of his competitors had disappeared beneath the weight of their own debts, and was stronger than ever before. If he was enjoying such financial success during times of political and economic uncertainty in this city, it was almost unimaginable how much he would be able to achieve in future years.

He greeted each morning with expectation and confidence. Everything seemed to be going his way. He was a giant in his hand-made size five and a half shoes.

Dimitri, meanwhile, was meeting a new world, a place of ideas and views based on other principles than economic necessity. Unlike the teachers at his school, who had been paid by the parents to hold certain opinions and to instil particular principles and beliefs into their pupils, the university professors who taught Dimitri were more independently minded. As well as his anatomy and pharmacology classes, he began to attend a philosophy class and was soon engaged in debates on the nature of right and wrong, the exploration of belief versus knowledge, wisdom versus truth, and so on. Political theory classes soon followed and his own views on society swiftly began to develop.

He had never been oblivious to what he saw around him, and his early days in Irini Street had given him more experience of the tattier parts of Thessaloniki than most of his fellow students had ever had. Even so, he had not seen for himself the true depth of poverty that existed in his city. He had supposed that the street traders who peddled cigarettes and combs probably lived in the shanty settlements near the railway station or in Toumba, but now he knew there were places considerably worse than those. He had to confront the fact that he had been brought up in a way that bore no relationship to the lives of the majority.

It was perhaps a good thing that he did not see very much of his father during those times. They would have come to blows. Dimitri was being exposed to every kind of new political idea and soon realised that his father did not live by any definable ideology, either political or spiritual. Konstantinos’ true God was money. He believed in the Greek Orthodox Church as an institution and as a cornerstone of the nation, but only worshipped when it suited him. He did not have any real ‘faith’ and merely observed the rituals because they defined him as a Greek citizen. His one true ‘belief’ was in his own ability to expand the profits of his business empire.

Nor did Konstantinos Komninos have a firm affiliation with any political party. He was a natural conservative. He had been nervous about the influx of refugees that had spilled into his city in the previous decade and resentful of what it had cost the city as much as the impact it had on the streets. He had had few friends among the departing Muslims, so he was quite happy to see them disappear. In some respects he had approved of the veteran statesman, Eleftherios Venizelos, because he had made Greece more Greek. In other respects, he was pro-Monarchy. He voted pragmatically but was a conservative with a small ‘c’ and a royalist with a small ‘r’, and had never hung a portrait of either the exiled King or Venizelos. Law, order and control of the working classes were good for business, and he had fully supported some purges that had taken place in the army and the university after a recent, failed, military coup.

For Dimitri a rapid sense of unease was developing. He lived in a luxurious mansion and yet instinctively sympathised with the majority who were poor. It was a conundrum that was hard to solve but he hoped his medical training would at least give him the opportunity to help some of the city’s less fortunate inhabitants.

‘Just try to live the best life you can,’ Olga said simply to Dimitri. She had been listening to her son’s dilemma, knowing that she must keep it from her husband.

Dimitri assiduously avoided his father. It was not difficult as Konstantinos was rarely at home.

Early one morning in his second term at the university, he saw Katerina and Elias on their way to work. When he spotted them coming towards him down the street they seemed self-contained in a world of shared laughter and contentment. They did not even notice him until they were only a few feet away.

‘Dimitri!’ exclaimed Katerina. ‘
Ti kaneis?
How are you?’

Within a few minutes they had exchanged dozens of life’s details, interrupting each other with questions, exclamations and answers.

‘How is Eugenia?’

‘Weaving in a workshop now. It’s hard work but more sociable.’

‘And the twins?’

‘Maria is married now and has moved to Trikala with their baby.’

‘A baby! So young!’

‘And Sofia is supposed to be getting married too …’

‘“Supposed”?’

‘Well … They’ve already been engaged for two years. It seems a long time to me … And Kyria Komninos?’

Katerina was finishing some beading on a new gown for her, so she had been on her mind.

‘She is well,’ answered Dimitri, knowing that this was the expected answer. ‘Perhaps you’ll be asked to deliver the dress?’

‘I would love to. But do you remember last time? I got into such trouble over that yellow dress. In any case, we’re so busy now that there is a special delivery service. Kyrios Moreno even has his own van now!’

What a pity, reflected Dimitri. He remembered the afternoon, two years earlier, when Katerina had delivered the yellow dress and how much gaiety she had brought into the house. He was not sure that he had seen his mother smile since then. He watched her every day, pale and beautiful, and knew that she never left the Niki Street mansion. Her only conversation was with Pavlina and himself, and he was certain that his parents rarely spoke. His father came in when she had already gone to bed and left before she was up, and Olga’s only contact with the outside world was to watch, from the safe distance of the drawing room, the comings and goings along the esplanade. She was always eager to hear about the university, hungry for the details of Dimitri’s day: where his discussions had led him, who his friends were. She lived her life through him, because she had no other.

‘Let’s go for coffee some time!’ enthused Elias. ‘We have unfinished business, don’t we?’

Dimitri laughed. Elias was referring to the
tavli
tournament they had begun over half a life-time earlier. They had played countless games and neither had ever been ahead by more than one win. It had been obsessional. Both of them had improved since that time and added new versions of the game to their repertoire.

Sending warm regards to their respective families, they agreed to meet again the following weekend.

Dimitri could not resist a glance over his shoulder. With a pang of envy, he noticed that Katerina’s head was inclined towards Elias’. Hardly a breath of air came between them.

Integral to Dimitri’s life at the university was his group of new friends. When they had finished their essays, they often met up again in the evening. There was always much to debate and the kafenion was a more appropriate place than the library.

Vassili was the clear leader of their group, not just because he was the most physical (he played soccer for one of the city teams), but because of his loud voice and lack of self-doubt. His background and upbringing had been very different from Dimitri’s. His father, a refugee from Asia Minor, was a trade union official, and socialist beliefs ran through his veins, as red as blood. A few months earlier he had met the charismatic Communist leader, Nikolaos Zakhariades who, like Vassili’s own family, had come from Asia Minor. Vassili had fallen under his spell.

Here was a set of beliefs with well-defined aims, and idealistic youths such as Vassili responded to the hugely powerful personality who promulgated them in this city. In days gone by, they might have followed Venizelos, but his beard had long since turned white and his powers were spent. Vassili’s new cause was more obsessive than a fresh love affair and more frenzied than a religious conversion.

The only thing that distracted him from politics was music. Late one Friday evening, or perhaps even in the early hours of the following day, when five of them, Dimitri, Vassili, Lefteris, Manoli and Alexandros, had emptied a bottle of
tsikoudia
and they had almost run out of ideologies to debate, Vassili told his group of friends that he was taking them to hear some music. There was a popular rebetika singer performing downtown and they must all go.

Dimitri’s father was scornful of most music so there had never been a gramophone in the Komninos house. In spite of this, Dimitri had heard plenty in the past few months. There was music on every street in this entertainment-hungry city, and crowds would gather in the sunshine as well as in the snow to hear klarino players from the mountains, mandolin bands and gypsy drummers.

Most café owners now had radios, and from the crackling sets normally screwed to the wall behind the bar, Dimitri had, of late, become acquainted with rebetika, the popular ‘music of the underground’, the music of suffering. He enjoyed the nostalgic oriental sounds of those who mourned their lost origins in the East but had not yet been to any live performances. There had always been work to complete, books to read.

‘Come on, Dimitri, your essay will wait. This
rebetis
won’t.’

They walked towards the railway station into a street filled with
tekhedes
, rebetika clubs, hashish bars, and brothels, and Dimitri thought how angry his father would be if he knew he was here. How else could he learn about life without exploring places other than the well-washed paving stones of the city’s bourgeois pavements? Vassili purposefully led them through a low archway into a dingy room, dimly lit and dense with smoke. The place was packed out and they squeezed their way through the crowd to the one table that was still free. Within seconds, a bottle of clear liquid was slammed down on the table with six small glasses.

Three musicians were already playing, one on bouzouki and two on baglama, its higher-pitched sister. The music was rhythmic, insistent, repetitive and the atmosphere charged with anticipation.

Eventually the big attraction emerged from a back room and made his way through the crowd. It took some time. He stopped to shake hands with a dozen people on his way to the area that was slightly raised to create a stage. At each table he accepted a
tsikoudia
and after clinking glasses with everyone close by, he downed it and moved on. He was smartly dressed in a suit and a gleaming white shirt, handsome, charismatic, smiling.

‘That’s Stelios Keromitis,’ Vassili shouted above the noise. He was a rebetika star from Piraeus and for a few nights he was in Thessaloniki.

When he finally reached his fellow musicians, he picked up the bouzouki that was waiting for him and took his seat. He fiddled with the pegs for a moment to tune his instrument, tucked his cigarette neatly between the little finger and third finger of his left hand and, with a nod at the others, began to play. After a few introductory bars he started to sing. It was a growl, like a lion, deep and full of pain and anguish, matching the lyrics, which spoke of death, disease and separation. Such themes were the reality of day-to-day life in the sordid alleyways through which they had walked to reach this place.

A large proportion of people in the room, Vassili included, were refugees from Asia Minor, and a yearning for the land of their birth was ever-present. The half-Eastern, half-Western sound of the music embodied their sense of separation and longing, and they inhaled the pathos of the music as deeply as they took the hashish into their lungs.

As the night wore on, the audience began to sing and occasionally Keromitis’ voice was almost lost. By now he was smoking a narghile and only sang the odd burst between inhalations. The air was opaque with smoke and noise, and alcohol had thickened their sensibilities.

About three in the morning, a man close to the front stood up and the nearby tables were pulled back. Slowly he began to revolve, his arms outstretched, cigarette in hand, his head angled to the side. Dimitri thought of the dervishes he had once been taken to see. This man’s trance-like state reminded him of theirs, though he looked earthwards rather than to heaven.

The dancer was lean and strong, his unbuttoned shirt revealing a glimpse of powerful torso. His friends began a slow rhythmic hand-clap as he rotated, gradually dropping closer to the ground and never losing his balance as he turned on his haunches and rose again. He seemed in a state of extreme introspection and occasionally, as if pulling energy from the earth, he leaped high into the air.

Dimitri noticed that the few women at the back of the room close to the bar, probably prostitutes, craned their necks to watch. One of them even stood on a chair to see over the crowd.

These women who were paid for sex by the hour would willingly have given their services for nothing to this unselfconscious human being. His sinuous body and apparent oblivion to their admiring glances enthralled them.