The Thread (29 page)

They were on their way to the workshop. Katerina was with them, as usual.

‘That’s just as well,’ said Elias. ‘Because sooner or later, we would have had to tell Mother why we were always buying paint.’

Isaac, who was always less optimistic than his younger brother about things, and had seen for himself the destruction in the Campbell district only five years earlier, felt obliged to add his comment.

‘You can lock a few people up,’ he said, ‘but if there are people who hate us, believe me, they’ll find a way to show it.’

‘Oh, come on, Isaac, don’t be so pessimistic!’ said his father.

‘I want to be wrong, but those feelings don’t just come from the Left. Didn’t you see the paper yesterday?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘There have been some attacks on Jews in Germany. Brutal ones. And not carried out by the Left.’

‘But how far away is Germany?’ scoffed his father. ‘Eh? It’s not Greece, is it?’

‘Father is right, Isaac! Who cares about Germany? Let’s at least stick to talking about Thessaloniki!’

‘You can stick to talking about anywhere you like,’ said Isaac, ‘but I think you’re being very naïve.’

‘Well, let’s not argue about nothing,’ said Saul Moreno. ‘Especially in front of your mother. You know how she hates to hear you two bickering.’

‘Do you really think people would come to us for all their lavish clothes if they hated us as you say they do?’ persisted Elias, wanting to disprove his brother’s theory.

While his sons were still pursuing their argument, Saul Moreno had opened up the door to the workshop. Even if he had lost a handful of customers, his order books were full. As never before, people were waiting for baptism and bar mitzvah clothes, ball gowns and bridal gowns, and suits – always suits. Even if the fashion for width, turn-up or trouser-leg flare changed by a centimetre, there were plenty of men in this city who would immediately come for new measurements.

Life in Thessaloniki carried on largely as before, with the rich continuing to be rich and the poor to be poor (but with fewer outlets to express their discontent). People were largely unaffected by the fact that life in other parts of Europe was changing dramatically. Then, in September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and another world war began.

There was no shortage of news in Thessaloniki as the months passed. Though some of the left-wing titles had been closed under the dictatorship, there were still hundreds of newspapers and many different views on the war. The dictatorship’s position was ambivalent. It was politically aligned with France, commercially dependent on Germany and friendly with Mussolini, a position of uneasy neutrality that could probably not be sustained for long. The good relations between Greece and Italy, which Metaxas had managed to sustain, began to deteriorate when Italian planes began to fly over Greek territory.

Dimitri and his friends constantly debated their positions.

‘What is Metaxas waiting for? Why doesn’t he think that we’ll go the way of the rest of Europe? I can’t stand his apathy!’

‘What do you want him to do?’

‘Get the country ready!’

‘Perhaps he knows what he’s doing,’ suggested Dimitri. ‘Maybe it’s a more complex game of diplomacy than we know.’

‘I don’t believe it. I think he’s just afraid to fight.’

‘An army general, afraid to fight! Whatever your politics, you’re a coward if you won’t fight for your country.’

The students had been stretched intellectually but not physically, and they were ready for action. They knew that Greece was a sitting target.

In the early hours of 28 October 1940, the Italian ambassador delivered a message to Metaxas at his home in Athens. Mussolini wanted to occupy certain strategic positions in northern Greece.

The Greek Prime Minister responded with a resounding ‘
Ochi
’ – ‘No!’

Within hours, the Italians invaded through Albania.

‘
IT IS WAR
!’ stated the headlines, quoting Metaxas. Everyone knew that the Greek army was unprepared and ill-equipped.

‘I’m joining up,’ said Lefteris, one of Dimitri’s fellow students. ‘Our studies can wait. If we don’t get the Italians off our soil now, there might not even be a university soon.’

‘What? You, the archenemy of an army general, are going to join the army?’ Dimitri asked with incredulity.

‘We have a common enemy, don’t we? How else do we fight him? We wait until Mussolini turns up here on our doorstep and then hit him over the head with a book?’

The others laughed, but it was not really a moment for humour.

‘Look, if we join up today, we’ll be on a train to Ioannina by tonight and in forty-eight hours we’ll be part of the action. We’ll be doing something, for God’s sake.’

Whatever the political leanings of these students, ultimately they were all patriots at heart. They were determined to protect their
patrida
, despite the fact that not one of them had ever held a gun, and passion rather than good sense would lead them to the front.

‘I’m with you,’ said Dimitri. Everyone round the table concurred. ‘And I’ll let Elias know what we’re doing.’

Everything moved quickly after that. On his way home to collect a few things, Dimitri stopped at the Moreno workshop. He had never been inside and Kyrios Moreno was surprised to see him.

‘Can I have a word with Elias?’ he asked with confidence, knowing that his appearance here in the middle of the day seemed strange.

‘I’ll send him out to see you in a moment,’ said Saul Moreno. ‘He’s with a customer at the moment. You’d think people might have other things on their minds than a new suit. But it’s business as usual, today. Perhaps they think that the invasion will push prices up.’

As he went through the door that led from the reception area into the workshop he left it half open behind him. Dimitri was transfixed by what he saw. A girl in a long, cream dress, covered in sequins that glistened like fish-scales, was standing on a chair, while another girl pinned the hem. With her arms held upwards and outstretched inside the full sleeves, she looked like an angel or a dervish, but when she rotated to aid the pinning, Dimitri realised it was Katerina. Wisps of hair had fallen across her face. It seemed as though her thoughts were a million miles away.

Suddenly the door swung open and Katerina caught sight of him.

‘Dimitri!’ she cried, with surprise and unconcealed delight. ‘What are you doing here?’

Before he had time to answer, Saul Moreno returned.

‘Elias is just coming,’ he said.

Katerina now stood in front of him. She looked like a small goddess.

‘It suits you,’ was all he could think of to say.

‘I’m exactly the same size as the customer,’ said Katerina. ‘So it saves her coming in for fittings.’

Dimitri was lost for words. He had only ever seen Katerina in simple, day-to-day clothes and the transformation was astonishing.

Elias then appeared.

‘Dimitri! What are you doing here? My father said you wanted to see me. What’s happened?’

Dimitri quickly recovered his composure. ‘The invasion …’

‘Yes, I know. We said it was going to happen, didn’t we?’

‘Well, some of us are going.’

There was not a moment’s hesitation before Elias responded.

‘I’m coming too.’

‘I knew you would. But we have to go almost immediately. There’s a train leaving for Ioannina at seven tonight.’

‘That soon! All right. I’ll tell my father, go home for some things and then meet you at the station.’

There was determination in Elias’ voice. Dimitri knew he would be there in good time before the train rolled out of the station.

While Elias went to tell his father, Dimitri was on his way to break the news to his mother. Konstantinos Komninos would not find out until his son was well on his way.

It was as though Olga half expected Dimitri to be going. When he knocked on the door of the drawing room, she was standing by the French windows that looked out over the sea. The water was rough that day.

‘You’ve come to say goodbye, haven’t you?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I know my own son,’ she said, with a catch in her throat. ‘That’s how I know what he will do.’

Dimitri put her arms around his mother.

‘I hope you think what I am doing is right.’

‘You’re going to protect Greece, Dimitri. Of course it’s right. And you are young and strong. Who else is going to do it, if not you?’

‘I’m going with some friends too, I won’t be doing it single-handedly,’ he said, almost jokingly.

Olga tried to smile, but she could not manage it, so she turned away and walked towards the gilded bureau that stood against the wall. She opened one of its many drawers and took out a brown envelope.

‘You’ll need this,’ she said.

Dimitri took the envelope without shame. From its thickness he could tell that there were millions of drachma inside. He and his friends would be needing them and he accepted them without hesitation.

‘Thank you, Mother.’

There was no merit in delaying a parting that was unbearable to both of them. Olga stood erect, with her arms tightly crossed. She was squeezing herself so tightly that she could scarcely speak or breathe. Such a posture was the only way she could prevent herself from losing control. Under no circumstances must she allow herself to cry.

She looked at her son with pleading eyes and gestured with a nod of her head that he should go.

He kissed her on the forehead, then he was out of the door. Pavlina thrust some food into his hand and, with some spare clothes and a few books, he left the house at a run.

The following day, the Moreno workshop buzzed with the news of Elias’ departure. Kyrios Moreno was impressed by the bravery of his son, and announced to all his young male workers that he would support them if they chose to make the same decision. Two of them did not return to work the following morning. They had followed Elias’ example and signed up. Everyone was proud of them, knowing that they were joining thousands of other young Jewish men who were going off to fight.

Soon there were news reports from the front. The army suffered from a dire shortage of equipment and supplies, and weather conditions were becoming severe, with deep snow and subzero temperatures in the mountains. Most soldiers lacked experience, but soon acquired it.

Katerina wondered how Kyria Komninos had taken her son’s departure and imagined that she would be as anxious as Roza Moreno. On her way home that night, she took a detour to the little church of Agios Nikolaos Orfanos, and lit two candles. She stared into the flames and prayed long, hard and equally for the safety of Dimitri and Elias. Elias and Dimitri. It was hard to know how to order their names.

The days went by and everyone waited for news. In the Moreno workshop they continued to sew. Sewing had always been a distraction for women when their men went away to war and never more so than now.

Katerina had just begun to do the edging on one of the most lavish commissions of her career, a wedding gown for the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family who lived in one of the largest mansions in Thessaloniki, one that outshone even the Komninos home for grandeur.

The white peaks and folds of the wedding gown on her lap took her imagination to the rugged mountains where the fighting was taking place. Stories of conditions on the front were circulating and everyone with loved ones there feared as much for the effects of frostbite as the Italian bullet. Katerina’s mind had wandered hundreds of kilometres from Thessaloniki and her unfocused gaze saw only the white blur of a blizzard. She realised that her eyes were swimming with unshed tears.

Suddenly she felt a sharp stab of pain. In her reverie, she had pricked her finger, jabbing the needle deep into the flesh and, before she knew it, a drop of blood had fallen onto the fabric. In this otherwise pure landscape of virgin white that spread across her lap and cascaded to the floor, there was now a red spot. Katerina was aghast. She quickly bandaged her finger with a scrap of discarded fabric and the bleeding stopped, but she could do nothing to shift the mark. She had been told by Kyria Moreno, very early on in her training, that nothing in the world could remove a blood stain. The only solution was to cover it up. This was why all the
modistras
must learn to avoid ever pricking their fingers. The mark would have to be carefully concealed so she began to create the first of a hundred pearl-bead flowers, hoping the bride would be happy when she saw this unexpected embellishment.

As she continued her work that morning, she reflected on her ‘accident’ and realised why she had lost concentration. She cared for Elias like a brother but it was her fear for Dimitri that had brought her to the brink of tears. It was Dimitri whose image she had seen in those mountains.

Good news then came from the front. In spite of the awful conditions, the Greek army began to push the Italians back. Within a month, they had captured the Albanian town of Koritsa. They then transferred their offensive to the coast, which gave them access to supplies from the sea, and meanwhile continued to advance into Albania.

It was the first victory against the Axis powers. The Italians had now been chased from Greek soil. The troops were heroes and their survival of the harsh condition had become legendary.

In the Niki Street mansion where a dinner was being given, a toast was raised. At last, Konstantinos Komninos felt he had a son he could boast about.

‘To our army! To Metaxas!’ he said. ‘And to my son!’

Olga raised her glass, but did not drink.

‘To my son,’ she repeated quietly.

There was excitement in the Moreno workshop too.

‘How long will it take them to get home, do you think?’ Katerina asked Kyria Moreno.

‘A few days, I expect. Perhaps a few weeks. We don’t know where they are exactly, do we?’

The Morenos had received letters from Elias, so they knew that he was in a unit with Dimitri.

It was, of course, naïve to think that they would be returning so soon. Soldiers were now needed to protect the border and Elias’ next letter informed his parents that he was obliged to stay. Katerina tried to conceal her disappointment.