The Thread (52 page)

‘Every day, I wake up and feel so lucky that I arrived in this city, Mitsos. Life might have been very different – I could easily have died in Smyrna, or in Mytilini, or gone to Athens and starved. But I didn’t. Call it what you will, but I would say that Fate brought me here.’

‘I can see why you feel so connected here,’ responded the young man. ‘I really had no idea …’

‘If Uncle Leonidas hadn’t rescued me, then I would never have got to Thessaloniki at all, would I?’ she smiled at him.

‘The only really unhappy years of my life,’ said Dimitri, ‘were the ones when I was away from here. All that time I yearned for the horror to end so I could return to this city, to marry your grandmother.’

Mitsos sat quietly, listening with rapt attention as the two of them spoke with love and passion of their home.

‘So you see, Mitsos, all our experiences are rooted here. We could go somewhere else and the memories would live on in our minds, but they are much more vivid here, in the place where everything happened.’

‘We could easily light candles in London or Boston for those we have loved,’ added his grandfather, ‘but it wouldn’t be the same.’

Each time Mitsos had visited his grandparents, he had been taken to the cemetery where he had watched his grandmother tending the family tomb. He knew that she went every week to sweep around the graves, to make sure the oil lamps still burned and to take fresh flowers. Watching over these activities was a statue of Olga. One year after her death, his grandparents had commissioned the best sculptor in the city and the seated figure was a breathtaking likeness, with its long, elegant limbs and patient expression.

Mitsos sat there thoughtfully, reminded of the words the blind man had spoken to him only that morning. The notion that all those people who had lived in Thessaloniki had left part of themselves behind suddenly seemed very real to him.

‘There’s something else, as well as the memories, that we keep here for our friends. They left some treasures behind too.’

In the corner of the living room, covered over with a white, lace-edged cloth, there was a wooden trunk. Katerina carefully removed the vase of artificial flowers and framed pictures of her children and grandchildren, took off the cloth and folded it. Then she lifted the lid.

‘This is another reason we stay,’ she said. ‘These things don’t belong to us, and even though their owners might never return, it seems wrong to take them away. We have merely been custodians.’

She lifted out the ornate red silk quilt inside which the ancient tallit had been sewn, several small cushions and two books. There was also the icon of Agios Andreas, which had been carried all the way from the Black Sea. When Eugenia had died, Katerina had wrapped it inside some silk and put it in the trunk for safekeeping.

‘We’re taking the quilt to the Jewish Museum in Agios Mina Street for their archive,’ said Dimitri. ‘They seemed very pleased when we went in to tell them what we had.’

‘I want to keep the cushions, though,’ said Katerina. ‘In case the families return. Even Elias might come back one day. And there is the letter that the Muslim family left for us and the two books.’

‘There’s something else at the bottom,’ said Mitsos, reaching in and lifting out a frayed piece of rather stained cotton. ‘This doesn’t look like “treasure” – unless this button is real silver!’

‘Well, I think it might be,’ said Katerina. ‘But that’s not why it’s valuable to me. It’s because I feel that piece of sleeve saved my life, and reminds me of the greatest kindness that’s probably ever been shown to me.’

Almost unconsciously, she touched her arm. Most of the time, Mitsos forgot that his grandmother’s arm was badly scarred as she usually wore a cardigan to cover it up, but tonight in the heat of the room, it was partly exposed.

‘Most importantly, I promised to look after it in case I could ever return it to the soldier that saved me.’

They all smiled.

It was around 11.30 p.m. now, but still hot in the apartment. Mitsos’ sweet grandmother poured him a glass of water and he looked at her, imagining her as a small girl setting off on her journey from Smyrna. His need to understand why they stayed here in this city was entirely fulfilled. But a question remained. He looked at the precious collection laid out on the table and then at his frail grandparents. Who would take care of these treasures when they were gone? What would happen if their owners returned?

‘Shall we go for a stroll, Mitsos?’ asked his grandfather. There was nothing he liked more than to take his grandson out for a late night beer in one of the bars on the waterfront, in the hope that some of his friends might be there so that he could show off this fine young man to them.

And Mitsos loved to go out at this time of night too. The streets were still buzzing. The air still balmy. He thought of the area in which he had grown up in Highgate, where homes were lined up like matches in a box behind their neatly trimmed privet hedges, and there was one pub that threw you out on the stroke of eleven.

They found a table outside on the harbour’s edge and a waiter greeted them and brought them chilled beers. Pleasure boats took people on night cruises and their white lights moved about on the ebony sea. The blackness of the water seemed fathomless, the stars infinite. Every few moments, one of them fell.

There was a beauty in the stillness and the darkness that he had never seen before and it almost overcame him with its power. For the first time in his life, he had begun to understand what lay beneath these pavements and behind the façades of these buildings.

He looked over at his grandfather, whom he loved so deeply, and knew with aching certainty that he would not always be there.

What would it be like to make Thessaloniki his permanent home? It was a place where people thronged the streets from dawn till dawn, where every paving stone, ancient, modern, polished or broken, was dense with history, and where people greeted one another with such warmth. He suspected that the city would forever be challenged by adversity but there was something else he was sure of: it would continue to be rich and full, of music and stories.

Suddenly he knew he would stay. To listen and to feel.