by Defne Suman
Panagiota couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, ‘How could anyone forget having seen you before?’ When she realized what she’d said, her cheeks again flushed bright red and she immediately turned her face to the sea. How shameful! Oh, God, what a shameful thing to have said!
The man laughed. ‘It should be me saying that, not you.’
Panagiota continued to stare out to sea in embarrassment.
‘Not for the same reasons as you, of course. You probably meant that you would remember me because my dark skin seems to be at odds with the way I am dressed and you find my hair strangely long for a man. Whereas I felt the need to say the same because I see before me a rare beauty.’
Curiosity got the better of Panagiota and she turned round to inspect him. Truly, she had never seen such a man. He had dark skin like that of an Arab slave but was dressed like a foreign gentleman in striped trousers with a matching frock coat, a green silk handkerchief in his waistcoat pocket, a cravat of the same colour, and a bowler hat on his head. Under his cravat a thick gold chain glimmered. Rings with large gemstones – a sapphire, a ruby, an emerald – adorned the long fingers of his brown hands. Was this man a prince, or Aladdin or what? She again examined his face, confused. Maybe he was from the palace. With his long thin nose he had the look of a sultan.
‘Are you a Turk?’
‘No, but we can speak Turkish if you like,’ he said, in Turkish that was as perfect as his Greek. ‘I am Indian. My name is Avinash Pillai.’
Panagiota knew enough Turkish to understand what the man said. An Indian man, eh? She’d thought Indian people only came to work as servants in the homes of rich Turks. Never in her life had she seen an Indian man dressed like a European. Busy gazing at his smooth round face with its beaklike nose, she didn’t notice that the stranger had reached for her wrist.
‘Would you honour me by telling me your name, Mademoiselle?’
She came to herself when she felt the man’s thick, purplish lips on her skin. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Your name?’
‘Panagiota. Panagiota Yagcioglu.’
As if tasting a glass of wine, Avinash Pillai rolled the name around in his mouth for a time. ‘Panagiota… Panagiota. A marvellous name. It befits an angel-faced lady like you perfectly.’
Not knowing what to do with this compliment, Panagiota took off her hat. Her curls tumbled free, over her shoulders and down her back.
Seeing the girl’s bared head, Avinash frowned in consternation. But he did not forget his manners. ‘Enchanté, Mademoiselle Yagcioglu,’ he said. ‘I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.’
Again, Panagiota did not know how to respond. Not counting the French teacher at school, no one had ever addressed her as Mademoiselle Yagcioglu before. Trying to hide her smile, she asked, ‘Are you visiting Smyrna?’
‘No, I live here.’
‘You must be a merchant then. Do you lodge at the Kraemer Palace?’
As if he had just realized that they were standing in front of the Kraemer Palace, Avinash turned and looked at the hotel’s blue-shuttered yellow facade. Panagiota’s shoulders dropped a bit.
‘No.’
‘Then?’
It was clear from her bass voice that under the girl’s delicate outward appearance, there was a spirit like a rocket ready to be fired. He took off his hat and scratched his head. Where could he have met this girl? There was a familiar fragrance coming off her hair, her skin, quite separate from the smell of jasmine and lavender.
‘I am not a merchant, and nor do I lodge at the Kraemer Palace.’ He smiled victoriously, as if he had posed a difficult riddle.
‘Ah?’
The girl bit her crimson lips. There was a gap between the two front teeth that was very familiar.
‘You are not a merchant. What then is your business in Smyrna?’
After a moment’s hesitation, Avinash decided to tell the truth – or something close to the truth. ‘I work at the consulate.’
‘The Indian Consulate?’ She blinked her bright black eyes several times.
Avinash smiled at the girl’s innocence. What a beautifully wide white forehead she had. ‘No, India does not yet have a consulate anywhere in the world. One day, hopefully. Makari.’ Seeing her impatience, he added, ‘I work at the British Consulate. But why do you laugh?’
‘Mister, you look nothing like those British men – that’s why! I pass the British Consulate every day on my way here, and the men who go in and out of that building are grumpy and old and look like they’ve swallowed their walking canes. Their skins are a purplish white. I’ve never once seen someone like you there.’
This time it was Avinash’s turn to laugh. ‘I am not British, but I studied at Oxford, which is one of England’s most prestigious universities.’
Panagiota lowered her head slightly and appraised his face with narrowed eyes.
All at once Avinash felt that he was about to figure out how he knew her. ‘How old are you, Panagiota?’
Panagiota was startled. The man had gone from flirtatious to fatherly. There was no more of that Mademoiselle Yagcioglu business. Why was that? Had she said something inappropriate? Oh, she had certainly asked too many questions. The bad woman inside her had woken up again, it seemed, a woman so cheap, she would do anything to get a man’s attention and approval. She remembered the tension in Stavros’s face as he’d untied the ribbons of her dress on the warm sand. Staring at Kraemer’s windows, she murmured, ‘I complete my seventeenth year in September.’
‘How wonderful. What a great age! Treasure your youth!’
She nodded. She had heard that kind of thing from the old aunties in the neighbourhood so often that she no longer even bothered to reply. She waited for the man to ask what she was doing in this area so early in the morning, but Avinash Pillai’s mind was elsewhere. Panagiota was offended that he had lost interest in her. Putting on her hat, she tried one more move.
‘May I ask you something?’
Avinash took out his elegant gold-chained pocket watch and, after glancing at it, turned to the girl. ‘Malista. Of course.’
‘I know it is not probable, but if the Turks entered Smyrna, the British would protect us, wouldn’t they?’
Avinash had not been expecting this question.
Panagiota had only said it to get the man’s attention, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt her eyes fill with tears, which meant that the possibility that the Turks would take over Smyrna was the reason she was frightened.
Putting his watch back in his pocket, Avinash drew close to Panagiota. His forehead touched her wide-brimmed hat. His skin smelled of something beyond the spices of distant lands.
‘Panagiota, tell me, does your family have relatives in Greece?’
Panagiota cocked her head like a dove listening to faraway sounds. ‘Why would we have relatives in Greece? Neither my mother, nor my father, nor my grandparents have ever set foot in Greece, not in their whole lives. We are from here. You have come from far away, so maybe you don’t know. Our country is here. I mean in Mikrasia. Asia Minor.’
‘Okay, what about the islands? Do you have family on Chios? Lesbos?’
Panagiota looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘No, sir. Why would we? We’re not immigrants from Chios, so we wouldn’t have relatives in Greece or on the islands. My grandparents emigrated from Kayseri to Chesme, and when my mother and father got married, they came to Smyrna. My father has a grocery shop. His name is Prodromakis Yagcioglu; everybody in the neighbourhood knows him as Grocer Akis.’
When Avinash made no comment, she added, ‘Soon Smyrna will be a part of Greece. That’s what the British promised. They signed an agreement in London, isn’t that right?’
Avinash felt as close to this young girl as if he saw her every night in his dreams; he was filled with a desire to take her in his arms and protect her. In the distance, bales of tobacco were being loaded onto ships. The Kordelio ferry was entering the inner h
arbour, heading for the Hamdiye Factory’s small wooden dock. Soon the Homerion students would be all around them. When she heard the whistle of the ferry, the anger that had blazed like embers in Panagiota’s eyes softened and faded; the mask had dropped and her face was now full of fear. She looked pleadingly at Avinash.
Avinash reached out, took off her hat and put his lips very close to her ear. His hair tickled Panagiota’s neck and she smelled that smell of distant lands again. Stavros and Pavlo didn’t smell like that. The smell wasn’t salt or pine but a cool, hard scent. As soon as she inhaled it, a sweet, warm cloud bloomed between her legs. Ashamed, she tried to draw back, but froze as she heard his whispered words.
‘If you want to save yourself and your family, my dear Panagiota, I advise you to escape to Greece as soon as possible, before the Turks enter Smyrna. Get rid of your possessions, take what you can carry, and go. Make a new life in Greece. If you do stay here, all you can do is pray that Almighty God will protect you. Do not expect protection from anyone but God.’
Even as his hot breath blazed through her, from her neck to her stomach, like a ball of fire, Avinash was placing the hat he was holding on Panagiota’s head, like a father sending his child off to school. Then he disappeared behind the yellow walls of the Kraemer Palace.
Escape Plan
For a week after that encounter, Panagiota did not go down to the quay. Throwing a knitted shawl around her shoulders, she would hurry to Fasoula to buy the things her mother asked for, then come back home and sit on the mat in the bay window until it was time to go to school. Katina assumed her daughter’s apathy was due to an argument she’d had with Pavlo. She sent her to the bazaar for unnecessary things in the hope that the two of them might bump into each other and have the chance to speak and make up. ‘While you’re in Fasoula, stop at the butcher’s and buy an okka of liver, enough for at least three days, and remember to have him slice it very thin,’ she would say. Or, ‘Wait in the square until the fresh bread comes out of the oven at the bakery; let’s eat it when it’s as hot as can be.’ Using such pretexts, she tried to keep her daughter out on the streets for a while longer. But the child had no appetite for anything. Her pink cheeks had faded to an ashen grey.
Katina’s hopes came to nothing. By Friday evening, when Panagiota went to the theatre with Pavlo, her mood still hadn’t improved. In fact, the poor girl looked even paler and more exhausted the following morning, though she didn’t refuse to go to the market. After returning to the house, she once again settled herself on the mat in the window, like a cat curled up in front of a stove. Pulling at her chin, she lost herself in the rooftops in the distance.
‘Find a way to escape to Greece. Only Almighty God can protect you. Do not expect protection from anyone else.’ For a week, the words of that strange man from India had been going round and round in her head – at home, at school, on the streets, at the theatre she’d gone to with Pavlo. (Her father had not given permission for the film.) His words seemed to imply that if Mustafa Kemal’s army entered Smyrna, the British would not protect the city’s Christian population.
Was that possible?
No, no. Impossible.
Those officers who’d come out of Kraemer’s with the fancy prostitutes had been very confident that the British fleet anchored in the bay would protect the city. ‘And if it becomes necessary, we will fire our cannons,’ they’d said. Who really knew what lay in store for the city – those officers, or that Indian man, Pillai, who worked at the consulate? Fear and anxiety gnawed at her insides and she’d not been able to sleep for days. She listened intently to every discussion about the war overheard in the coffeehouses, the square, the grocery shop.
She had heard nothing of comfort.
That first encounter between Panagiota and Avinash took place in March 1922, at which time the two armies had withdrawn to opposite edges of the Eskisehir plateau. They were waiting for the Allies in European cities far from the war to make decisions which would determine their fates. After the Italians withdrew their forces from Asia Minor, the French followed suit. The British, who had Constantinople in their hands, had ceased all mention of Smyrna being annexed to Greece. Some of the soldiers from Greece, fed up, had deserted and gone back to their homeland. King Constantine, who’d been ill for some time, had collapsed both physically and spiritually after the Battle of Sakarya and returned to Athens. Rumour had it that Commander Papoulas, who had lost the battle, was to be fired and replaced by Dousmani, head of the armed forces. News coming from the front was relentlessly depressing, relentlessly dire.
On the morning that Avinash met Panagiota by chance in front of Kraemer’s, the British Secret Service had been shaken by Churchill’s latest telegram. The telegram, relayed from Cairo by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, stated: The Greeks have got themselves into a geo-political situation where anything short of a decisive victory means defeat, and the Turks are in a position where anything short of a comprehensive defeat means victory. The government of Lloyd George, which had encouraged Greece for years, was now cutting off its support. The Greek army had been left to fend for itself in the middle of Asia Minor.
Panagiota could not get Minas’s bitter letters out of her mind: My love, I know that we are setting out on a bloody campaign of death.
‘Kori mou, take these potatoes and peel them with Auntie Rozi. The poor old woman must be bored and lonely sitting all by herself the whole day on that chair in front of her house. You can keep her company.’
Taking the bowl full of freshly washed potatoes from her mother and tucking it under her arm, Panagiota went down to the street like a ghost. Without even noticing the children playing marbles over by the fountain, she walked slowly across to Auntie Rozi’s house and sat down on her doorstep, wrapped in her cardigan. The sky was completely blue and the little square was lit up in the sunlight.
Dressed in black from head to toe, toothless Auntie Rozi was peeling oranges with her wrinkled fingers. She handed a piece to Panagiota. Cats were licking the stomachs they had bared to the sunshine. They sat side by side for a time without speaking. From nearby came the smell of freshly ground coffee, the tinkle of backgammon pieces, and occasionally the raised voices of men sitting under the coffeehouse arbour. The coffeehouse apprentice came out, swinging his tray.
‘Coffee? Ladies, would you like some coffee?’
This apprentice had been one of the boys who’d serenaded Panagiota under her window on Menekse Street in the summer. A lewd smile crept across his face when he saw Panagiota sitting on her elderly neighbour’s doorstep.
‘Lokum? Lemonada? Ice cold.’
‘Go away. We don’t want anything. Get lost.’
She put another piece of orange into her mouth; it tasted like sunshine on her tongue, sharp and refreshing. Biting her bottom lip, she glanced over at the police station. Her lip was crusty from being chewed on.
‘You must find a way to escape to Greece.’
Panagiota had not mentioned the fear that was eating away at her to her mother and father. They would have been alarmed that she’d been taken in by the words of an Indian man she’d met on the street, and they wouldn’t have taken her concerns seriously anyway. If she’d brought up what Avinash Pillai had said at supper, for example, her father would have shouted angrily, ‘For God’s sake, that’s crazy nonsense!’ And her mother would have been sad that Panagiota was sad.
As the only child left in the family, Panagiota felt responsible for the happiness of her mother and father. Once, when she was younger, she’d been caught humming a song in class and had been sent out to stand in the corridor by herself for the rest of lesson. But her real punishment had been anticipating the disappointment on her mother’s face when she read the note that the principal would send home. Panagiota was their miracle baby. It was her job to be the source of joy in the house and to never say or do anything that would frighten or upset them.
For days now, she’d been trying to come up with a way to save them al
l, should danger strike. After school, she’d been coming straight home and settling herself on the mat in the window, spending hours staring at the red tower of the nearby orphanage as she thought of a plan.
They had no relatives in Greece, and nor did they have the money to pay for a boat to take them there in an emergency. If she were to gather up the earrings, bracelets and crucifixes that had accumulated in her dowry trunk and sell them to the jeweller Dimitri in Fasoula, there was no doubt that Grocer Akis would learn of it. And if she took the gold to the Armenian district to sell, she could get cheated. Besides, her own jewellery wouldn’t be enough to save them all. What if she were to remove a few pieces from Katina’s jewellery box, pieces that her mother never wore, one at a time? No, she would never dare do that.
The Indian man had advised them to get rid of all their possessions and keep only what they could carry. What did that mean – were they supposed to sell the house? Her mother would never leave her home or her father his grocery shop. And when they came back, where would they live? What about their furniture?
It was obvious; there was only one thing to do.
With her face set in an expression like that of a commander going into battle, she stood up from the marble doorstep. Auntie Rozi was choosing a cauliflower and leeks from the bent-over vegetable seller, Mehmet; Panagiota waited patiently for her to finish and make the sign of the cross three times over her head. Then, following the vegetable seller Mehmet with confident steps, she made her way to the southern end of the square. The bowl of unpeeled potatoes remained on Auntie Rozi’s doorstep.
In the back room of the two-storey police station building that smelled of toilets, Pavlo Paraskis was sitting at his messy desk with its overflowing ashtrays reading the Amaltheia newspaper. On the wall behind him there was a large map showing the district of Aydin under Greek control. Pavlo did not immediately notice Panagiota standing in the doorway, and Panagiota took the opportunity to observe him. He had thrown his cape on the desk. His brown hair was slicked back and carefully waxed. He was giving all his attention to whatever he was reading, like a child struggling with a mathematics problem. His wide, protruding forehead shone in the sunlight striking the room. Why didn’t he have a moustache like everyone else? A small beard and moustache would improve that childish appearance. God, what if he was unable to grow a beard?
