The Thread (6 page)

Upstairs, the pot continued to simmer. The long-suffering mistress of the house expected her menfolk in an hour or so and meanwhile went upstairs to rest. Her daughter was already there, lying in the darkness. It was much easier for her to get some sleep now, before her parents were both there in the same room. Most nights her father noisily and roughly manhandled her mother before they both fell asleep and then grunted and snored until morning.

Down below, a fire began to take hold within the pile of straw, but the smell of burning feathers and the squeals of the terror-struck livestock went unnoticed by mother and daughter, both now dozing two floors above.

It was a matter of seconds before the flames curled around the wooden beams and crept along the ceiling. Soon the whole ground-floor room was alight, and walls and ceiling became sheets of flame as the fire progressed with speed and efficiency, upwards to the next floor and then outwards to the adjacent homes.

Even the increasing heat of the house was not enough to rouse them. Summer temperatures in Thessaloniki were often intense. In the end, it was a noise, like a huge explosion, that disturbed them. It was the sound of the kitchen floor falling into the basement.

In a moment, both women were on their feet, wide awake, dripping from heat and terror, grasping each other’s hands. The fire was already climbing the stairs so they knew their route that way was blocked, but they could hear familiar voices shouting their names in the streets below.

There was no time for weighing up the risks. Daughter first, then mother, they climbed onto the windowledge and threw themselves on the mercy of their menfolk below. Then, just as their house collapsed neatly in on itself, they ran for their lives, finding themselves part of a human river moving swiftly eastwards. Soon they blended into the crowd, quite unaware of their pivotal role in the conflagration.

Neighbours had quickly noticed the billowing smoke and smelled the appetising aroma of roasted goat, and all of them had been safely down the street before their own homes were consumed in the blaze. There was no time for speculating on the cause and certainly no time for spectating. The fire was travelling as fast as the fierce, warm wind would take it.

Within an hour of ignition, dozens of these homes were gone; their largely wooden construction and the summer drought had turned the city into a tinderbox. There had been no rain since June and there was nothing to stand in the way of the fire’s spread. The city had a few fire engines, but they were old and inefficient and, in any case, much of the local water supply had been diverted to the vast encampments of Allied troops outside Thessaloniki.

In the centre of the town, where there was as yet no sign of the fire, Konstantinos Komninos was about to reach his showroom. He had a spring in his step. At last, he had a son.

There was no one to share the news with, apart from one man. For longer than Komninos could remember, there had been a caretaker and night watchman who sat, night and day, in a small airless cubicle at the entrance of the showroom. Tasos had worked there for more than half a century. He walked up and down the rows of fabric once or twice a day, occasionally strolled out into the street to find a lemonade vendor, or some tobacco, but for most of the time he was simply sitting, watching and sleeping. He could glimpse the sky from a high window that faced the street. At night, this diminutive, dark-haired man curled up to sleep on the couch at the back of his small room. Komninos had no idea where he ate or how he washed. He was paid to be there for twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and he had never complained, in all the years he had known him.

When he heard the sound of the key in the lock, Tasos came out of his lair to greet his boss. He knew that Komninos had been summoned home earlier and was keen to hear the news.

‘How is Kyria Komninos?’ he asked.

‘She has delivered safely,’ replied Konstantinos. ‘I have a son.’

‘Congratulations, Kyrios Komninos.’

‘Thank you, Tasos. Is there anything to report?’

‘No, all as quiet as the grave here.’

Konstantinos had opened the main door to the showroom and was about to shut it behind him when Tasos called out after him.

‘Kyrios Komninos, I forgot – your brother called in about twenty minutes ago.’

‘Oh?’

Komninos was annoyed by the thought of his brother coming to the showroom on a Saturday afternoon. This was the time he always spent here alone when it was closed to customers, masterminding the incomings and outgoings, putting himself in control of the cash flow, profit and loss accounts, writing the correspondence and doing the deals that unquestionably positioned him as the head of the business.

‘He’d heard that a fire has broken out somewhere up in the north and wanted to know if I knew anything about it. How I should know, sitting around in here all day, I’m not sure.’

Komninos shrugged.

‘Typical of Leonidas to pick up rumours the minute he’s back on leave!’ said Konstantinos. ‘Fortunately some of us have better things to do.’

Komninos liked to walk through his silent showroom and run his fingertips across his rolls of silk, velvet, taffeta and wool. He could tell a fabric’s price per metre merely by touching it. This was his greatest pleasure. For him, these cloths were more sensual than a woman’s skin. The rolls reached from the floor to the ceiling, and ladders ran along on runners the length of the fifty-metre room so that the top ones could be easily accessed. Everything was arranged by colour from one end of the room to the other, with crimson silk next to scarlet wool, and green velvet next to emerald taffeta. His salesmen were responsible for colour sections rather than specialist fabric types, and he could see at a glance whether any of them had been inefficient with their inventory. The symmetry and perfection of this space without the clutter of the staff pleased him inordinately. His father, from whom he had inherited the business, had always encouraged him to come in and enjoy the order and calm of the showroom without staff and customers.

‘Think of this place,’ he used to say to the five-year-old Konstantinos, ‘as the Alpha and the Omega of our lives.’

Then he would point out the cutting shears neatly left at the centre of each of the polished cutting tables.

‘There is the Alpha,’ he would say, tracing the ‘A’ shape of the scissors. ‘And here is the Omega.’ He would point at the roll-ends made of perfect ‘O’s. ‘In this family, those are the only letters you need to know.’

Each day, Konstantinos thought of his father’s words, and now he was able to look forward to the time when he could repeat them to his own son.

On Saturdays he could enjoy being there without feeling the eyes of his employees on him. He was a man who knew he was not well-liked. It was not as though he cared, but it still made him feel uncomfortable. He was aware of the way in which people stopped speaking to each other when he walked by and could feel the heat between his shoulder blades as they observed his retreating back.

His office was raised, with windows on three sides and a clear view of the whole width and length of the enormous room. It was hard for his employees to see him through the blinds, but from his watchtower he could see everything that went on. Important customers were always invited up there and coffee was sent out for. Komninos would pull up the blinds on those occasions, knowing that the view of his vast rainbow never failed to impress. Customers came from every town and city in Greece to purchase, and few of them left without buying in bulk. There was no other cloth wholesaler with such a range, even in Athens, and he could hardly keep up with demand.

In addition, he was the sole supplier of wool cloth for most of the army regiments that had been mobilised in northern Greece at a time when, with thousands of Allied forces camped outside the city, the price of everything on the commodities market, from wheat to wool, had gone up. For the wealthy, there was money to be made. Komninos had always read figures better than letters, and had a nose for wise investments.

The business had been left equally to him and his brother, Leonidas, who was his junior by eight years, but the younger man had little interest in spending his days in this barn of a showroom, and even less in the complexities of speculation on the price of wool on the commodities market. Leonidas was an army officer and a life of action suited him much more than a life of commerce. These brothers had absolutely nothing in common except their parents, and now that the latter had gone there was more antipathy than love between them. Even when they were small it was hard to believe they were from the same family. Leonidas, tall, with fair hair and blue eyes, was Apollo to his brother’s Hephaestus.

As Konstantinos sat in his office, studying his ledger and doing mental calculations of current weekly income versus interest rates and rising expenses, offset against a new order for fifteen thousand metres of wool for army greatcoats (which could be supplied from material he had had in stock for two years, but which he would sell at this year’s price), his brother was running like a madman down the empty street.

Tasos was roused from his siesta by the sound of Leonidas bursting into the building.

‘Tasos …’ breathless, hardly able to speak, ‘… we’ve got to get hold of Kosta!’

‘He’s here. In his office,’ answered the caretaker. ‘What on earth is the matter? Don’t normally see you in a hurry!’

Leonidas ran past him into the showroom and took the steps of the spiral staircase up to the office two at a time.

‘Kosta, the city is burning! We’ve got to get some of this stock out!’

‘Tasos told me you had gone off to look at some fire or other,’ answered the older brother, without raising his eyes from his columns of figures. His sense of position and dignity would not allow him to react. ‘Hasn’t it been put out yet?’

‘No! It’s raging, Kosta! It’s out of control! Come down into the street now and smell it! It’s coming this way! For God’s sake, I’m not making it up!’

Konstantinos could hear the fear in his brother’s voice. It was not the voice he used when he played practical jokes.

Leonidas took him by the arm and led him down the stairs and out into the street.

‘You can’t see anything yet, but don’t you smell it? And look at the sky! It’s nowhere near sunset and it’s getting dark!’

Leonidas was right. The reek of burning was palpable, and the clarity of the afternoon sky had been replaced by a haze.

‘I want to see where it is, Leonidas. I don’t want us to panic if there’s no need.’

‘Well, where it was ten minutes ago might be different from where it is now … All right, let’s go and see if they’ve started to get it under control.’

While they hurried along, Konstantinos told his brother about his new nephew. It was an incongruous moment to deliver such news, but it gave Komninos great satisfaction to announce that there was now an heir for the business.

Leonidas was very fond of his sister-in-law and it was to see Olga rather than his brother that he made a visit to Niki Street a priority whenever he was on leave. If he ever settled down, he wanted to find a woman who was as beautiful and serene as she. Sometimes he wondered if such a cold character as Konstantinos deserved such a fine woman and tried to dismiss the question of what would have happened if he had met Olga first.

‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t be with her?’

‘All in good time,’ answered Konstantinos.

Leonidas shook his head with disbelief, thinking not just of Olga and the baby, but the wonderful Pavlina, of whom he was very fond.

The smoke thickened as they hastened northwards and Konstantinos stopped to tie his silk handkerchief around his face to protect himself from the particles of ash that swirled around them. When they turned into a main street, they were met by a crowd of people coming towards them. Konstantinos had seen plenty of mobs during the political upheavals of the past few years, but these people wore a different expression.

Many of them were struggling beneath the weight of their possessions – bulky items for which they had scrimped and saved – cupboards, mirrors, even mattresses. These were far too precious to leave behind. Every porter in the city had been attracted to the business potential of the disaster, and their handcarts, spilling over with people’s motley collections of objects, now blocked the streets.

On the horizon, still some distance away, Konstantinos saw the unmistakably fierce glow of fire licking upwards into the sky.

‘Do you believe me now?’ demanded Leonidas, stopping to cough and catch his breath.

‘We need to get back to the showroom,’ said Konstantinos, his voice weak with fear. ‘And we need as many porters as we can find.’

They were already too late for such a thought. All the able-bodied men who might sell their services had been hired out. Observing the mêlée, the two brothers realised that they were on their own. Tasos was the only one who could help them. As they turned back towards the showroom, their pace quickened to a jog.

‘I reckon we’ve got no more than a couple of hours, unless they get it under control soon,’ said Leonidas over his shoulder.

Konstantinos was trying to keep up with his brother, who was a head taller than he, and much more athletic. He responded with a grunt. It was at least twenty years since he had run anywhere and his chest burned. The thought of losing any of his stock spurred him on, however, and within ten minutes they were both through the door and explaining to Tasos what had to be done.

‘I’ll identify the most precious fabrics,’ said the older brother, ‘so that you and Leonidas can make them a priority for removal! Pile them up by the door and we’ll take them a cartload at a time across Egnatia Street. We should be able to fit thirty in each load.’

Egnatia Street was the wide boulevard that ran west to east across the city.

‘There’s no chance of the fire crossing over it so anything we can get on to the south side will be safe,’ said Leonidas.

The three men got to work. For the first time in a decade, Konstantinos ran up and down the ladders, pulling out bolts of fabrics and letting them drop to the floor. They were picked up by Leonidas and carried out of the building, where Tasos piled them on his cart. The first cartload was ready and together Tasos and Leonidas trundled it down the street. Five minutes later they deposited the rolls outside a customer’s shop.