by Defne Suman
Panagiota had never seen him this agitated, but she was upset that he’d scolded her in front of her friend. So what? Couldn’t she even go out for an ice cream with Adriana? Her mother had let up, but now this Pavlo was going to start? And he hadn’t even wished her a happy birthday. Raising his chin as if she was smelling the air, she turned her face towards the sea. Adriana had walked away to leave the two of them alone. She’d found a relative fishing in front of Kraemer’s and was chatting with him.
‘As you see, I am here. What’s going on?’
‘Panagiota mou, listen to me now. Okay, my darling? Are you listening?’
His huge hands squeezed Panagiota’s shoulders until they hurt. She scowled, but he paid no attention.
‘I have arranged a fishing boat to take you to Chios. It will leave at midnight tonight from the outer harbour. The fisherman’s name is Panagiotis – he knows your father. Be at the outer harbour at midnight on the dot. He will light three candles on his boat as a sign. Okay? Endaksi?’
Panagiota nodded distractedly.
‘Now, omorfula mou, my beautiful one, run home immediately and gather up everything you have that is of value. Don’t take too much. Jewellery, parades, cash, gold hidden in jars, that’s all. Leave your rugs, candlesticks and weapons. Lock all the doors securely, lower the shutters and fasten them from the inside. Your father should also lower the shutters of his shop and put locks on them. He should leave nothing valuable there, not even in the storeroom at the back. Do you understand? Panagiota, are you listening? Why aren’t you paying attention? Giota, agapi mou, my love, this is important. You are listening, aren’t you? This is a matter of life and death.’
Panagiota nodded again. Her ears were ringing. She was vaguely listening to him.
He set his bag on the ground and took her two hands in his. His puppy-dog eyes gazed directly into his fiancée’s, black beneath her thick lashes.
‘My love, as you can see, they’re evacuating us. We’re all going. If we stay, we’ll be taken prisoner. From this evening, not a single unit of police officers, gendarmes or civilian guards will be left in Smyrna. Can you imagine how much danger that will put you in? You cannot stay here another night. A great catastrophe may be upon us. Listen to me now, my one and only. When you get to Chios, do not linger. Arrange an immediate passage to Piraeus. You understand, don’t you? I will be waiting for you at Piraeus. In case something happens, I’ve written here my address in Ioannina. Even if I’m not there, my family will be expecting you, all of you. Be careful not to lose this piece of paper, okay, Giota mou? Darling, are you all right? Your face is so—’
Suddenly a loud commotion was heard from the port. The refugees, who’d been sitting around semi-conscious amid the sacks, camels, carts and belongings they’d brought from their villages, were on their feet, shaking their fists in the air and booing someone in unison. Adriana and her fisherman relative had stopped chatting and were looking at the boat preparing to raise its anchor at Passport Pier. Pavlo stood beside Panagiota to get a better view of what was happening.
Aristidis Stergiadis, High Commissioner of Smyrna, who for the last three years had been in charge of the city, was making his way through the crowd; with confident, dignified steps, he ignored the arms raised in anger, the curses and jeers, the screams of fear and fury, and strode on towards the motorboat which would take him to the British ship waiting for him in the bay.
Lost in thought, Pavlo put his arm around Panagiota’s waist. She drew away, discomfited. What if Stavros should appear? What if he came and found her in another man’s arms? She twiddled the ring on her finger. The shouts of the crowd jeering at Stergiadis intensified. The Europeans sitting at the tables outside Café Ivi stood up to see what was going on.
Pavlo’s eyes were fixed on the manoeuvres of Stergiadis’s ship. He didn’t notice that Panagiota had slipped out of his arms. The vast majority of police and civilian security forces whose duty it had been to keep Stergiadis safe and protect the populace of Smyrna were leaving the city. The few that remained were just enough to guard the largest firms and the consulates and orphanages. Pavlo’s superiors had informed them that from now on the Allied soldiers would protect only their own citizens. The American soldiers who swaggered around the streets had been alerted and would be leaving the poor girls and women who trailed after them in the lurch. He looked at the hordes of people gathered at the shore. The people who minutes earlier had screamed with all their might at the boat carrying Stergiadis to the British battleship, that stern-faced man who’d ruled the city for three years, were now silent, glancing at each other with eyes full of fear.
‘What will happen now? If the Turks come, who will protect us?’
The piercing whistle of a ship tore through the silence. It came from the direction of Punta. Pavlo grabbed Panagiota’s hands. Then the hands were not enough – he took hold of her shoulders and pulled her to his chest, burying himself in her face, her neck, her hair, breathing in the jasmine scent of her skin. When he unwound his arms, tears were streaming down his cheeks.
‘Giota mou, my darling, may God keep you safe.’
The throngs of soldiers surging towards the ship that was urgently blowing its whistle took the young lieutenant with them. In his spotless khaki uniform, Pavlo was being dragged away from Panagiota. Easily distinguished among the capeless, lice-infested heads of the others by his carefully waxed and combed hair, he turned for one last look at his fiancée. Then, leaping up into the air so as to be visible above the taller soldiers, he pointed with one hand to an imaginary wristwatch and with the other to the dock in the outer harbour. He was reminding her of the fishing boat he’d arranged to take them to Chios. His clean, freshly shaved face and his eyes the colour of milk-chocolate shone with the innocence of love.
Panagiota was ashamed of herself for feeling nothing for this sensitive boy. Involuntarily she touched her lips with her fingertips and blew him a kiss. Settling his cape over his head, Pavlo smiled almost as if he was laughing, and was then quickly swallowed up by the crowd, disappearing from sight.
Black smoke from the ships on the horizon trembled in front of the red sun as it dipped into the sea. Panagiota raised her hands and looked through them at the light reflected off the water. The veil separating her from other beings had lifted; her fingers had become transparent and shimmered like light, like heat, like sound. They were vibrating in front of her like delicate waves. There was a supreme order in the world and each person had their own place in it. She was never going to be separated from her place in Smyrna. All at once the curtains in front of her eyes were parted. The past and the future appeared crystal clear in her mind. The gates of paradise would soon close; and while everyone else would be locked outside, she would be left behind in a land of loss. This was how she envisioned the story that was her life. This was how her fate had been woven.
Her eyes filled with tears.
While she was removing from her finger the thin gold ring with her name and Pavlo’s engraved on the inside, two big teardrops rolled from her cheeks onto the pink satin shoes.
Last Encounter
They found Avinash Pillai dead in his house in Tilkilik one morning. When the fifth of the month came and Avinash had not rung his bell, the owner of the house, accustomed over thirty years to receiving his rent regularly on the first of each month, became suspicious. They entered the house using the spare key and found the elderly Indian man’s body, wrinkled like a prune, seated cross-legged on a cushion in front of the fireplace. He was wearing baggy trousers that came down to his knees and there was no belt around his waist. His white hair fell across his chest, and both his chest and his head were bare.
They did not understand immediately that he was dead because he was sitting as if lost in meditation. It was strange. There was no decay, no stench. It was a while before they realized he wasn’t breathing and his body was cold.
The voice on the other end of the telephone that one of the children at the Mansion w
ith the Tower was holding to my ear told me all this in one breath. There had been only one telephone number on his desk among the chaotic jumble of notes, old newspapers, shop signs saved from the fire, faded photographs, and officially translated and stamped journals. And that number was ours at the Mansion with the Tower.
I wrote down my response on a piece of paper which I thrust into the child’s hand. The two of us were at home alone. He read it out: ‘Please call the British Consulate.’
It wasn’t up to me to bury Avinash Pillai! He wasn’t my relative; he wasn’t my anything. He was a nutcase pushing a hundred who’d never stopped wandering the streets in search of anything that might remind him of his old lover. According to him, he was looking for me. Wait a minute, what were his words exactly? That he had never stopped searching for me. And that if he’d found me in time, he would have taken me to Paris, to Edith.
Not interested.
I’d had my share of deaths. And lives. There was no point ruining my peace of mind with another life’s dreams.
Besides, what would have happened if he’d taken me to Edith? I would have died in Paris in 1944. Edith lived in a building that was destroyed not by Hitler but by the British and Americans when they bombed Paris. Furthermore, it was a poor neighbourhood.
I don’t know what Edith was doing there. I didn’t ask.
Probably her brother-in-law Philippe Cantebury had finally managed to kick her out of the business and take away her partnership privileges. Anyway, even he had lost his offices, and his deeds and bonds and so on in the Great Fire, and their houses had been confiscated. They never came back to Izmir. Even though these details didn’t interest me in the slightest, Avinash insisted on sharing them with me. That night – he made sure to mention that it was 21 April – Edith was asleep in her apartment near Porte de la Chapelle. Avinash wasn’t with her. Even as she aged, that ill-tempered woman wouldn’t consider living in the same house as Avinash. Decades had passed since then, but the former spy was still sad when he said that. When a person’s heart has been scratched, like a broken record they get stuck and can never move on.
That it was a British plane and not a German one that had dropped the bomb on Edith’s building was salt to the wound for Avinash. At this point in the story, he bowed his head, as if he were responsible.
‘Hey you! God’s son of India! Why should you, of all people, feel responsible?’ I did think of saying that, but then it occurred to me that because this Avinash had been a spy – retired now, of course – there was a possibility that he’d known that the British were planning to bomb an important arms depot in the 18th Arrondissement, where Edith lived. Why were the British and Americans bombing Paris anyway? That also didn’t interest me. Hadn’t I personally experienced how those monsters could switch sides like backgammon pawns during a war?
And also, what did I care about Edith Lamarck?
If Sumbul had been alive, she would have listened avidly to the story of Edith’s body being torn to shreds by British bombs. And she would have cried copious tears. But, listen, things were different by the time Avinash told me this story. A half-century had passed since Sumbul had hanged herself in the Mansion with the Tower.
After Avinash lost Edith, he set his heart on finding me. He believed that I was Edith’s daughter. ‘Believe’ is not the right word: the clever spy was not in the slightest doubt. If I had a little patience, he said, I too would believe it by the time he got to the end of his story. So be it. Since he wanted it so badly, I let him tell the story.
If I’d wanted to object, what could I have done – pushed the white-bearded granddad down the stairs?
We were sitting across from each other in my tower, he in a rocking chair with a wicker seat and wooden back, I on Sumbul’s old bed, whose pink paint had peeled away long ago. An electric fan was between us, though it made not the tiniest difference to the hellishly hot tower. From the small barred window behind me came the screams of seagulls and the chug-chug of fishing boats. You could hear the whistles of the Karsiyaka ferries and the zoom of warplanes heading to Cyprus. The television downstairs had begun playing military marches nonstop, which drove me crazy.
Having lost Edith, Avinash came to Izmir and moved into a hotel room. It was the year the Americans flattened Japan. Another September. He didn’t remember the date, but it was a dark, moonless night. The misery of the Second World War had made the world forget the First. He tried to talk about it to a few of the old people in the coffeehouses and bazaars, but as soon as they heard the ‘G’ of either ‘Great Fire’ or ‘Greek’, they’d get up and move to another table. Avinash was bemused by this. It was as if the whole city had suffered universal amnesia. They gazed at him with vacant eyes, as if the old Smyrna had never existed, had not been burned to the ground, had not lost half its population. Most of the churches had been destroyed, schools had become Turkish, and all the old records, ledgers and deeds had been incinerated. Our old neighbourhood had been put up for auction. When nobody bought it, they turned it into a park.
When Avinash understood that the past had become a secret here, a taboo subject that could never be talked about, he went to Greece. He went round asking for me in the squatter neighbourhoods where fugitives from Smyrna, Aydin and the interior of Asia Minor had settled.
‘Thank goodness I had in my hand your name and the name of the neighbourhood in Smyrna where you’d lived,’ he said, reminding me of our first encounter at the quay. ‘I wasn’t feeling my way in complete darkness. It didn’t take long before I found someone who knew you and your father.’
The refugee settlements around Athens, Piraeus, Faliro and Kastella had popped up like mushrooms. It was to these shanty towns that the refugees from Smyrna had fled, cobbling together huts made out of bricks and tin and wooden fruit crates, painting them white and covering the roofs with tar paper. Sewage flowed openly through the middle of some of them.
In the settlement called Nea Smyrna people made do with curtains rather than doors in their houses, but in the courtyards of each house they still managed to raise spindly little plants in tin containers. Here was a pot of basil, there a pot of carnations. One portion of the water they drew from the community well was for themselves, the rest was for the flowers and trees that reminded them of the life they’d left behind in the fertile soil of old Smyrna.
The residents of Nea Smyrna welcomed Avinash with open arms.
In contrast to the people back in Izmir, here everyone remembered old Smyrna. Like a sweet dream, they held the memory of it in the centre of their hearts. Seeing Avinash, the men in the coffeehouse stopped their backgammon game midway through; women, old and young, brought chairs out in front of doors that opened onto sewage-smelling courtyards and offered the former spy whatever they had to hand. Although more than twenty years had passed since the Great Catastrophe – they referred to what had happened during those horrifying days as the Great Catastrophe – some still asked when they would be permitted to return to their homes. In lowered voices the men would urge Avinash, ‘Mister, tell us which political party we should vote for to get us sent back to our country.’ Some could not accept that they had left their rose- and jasmine-scented city forever and that their life would continue in this sewage-smelling settlement on the outskirts of the city of Athens.
Suddenly, Avinash paused and I realized that he had some information concerning me. It wasn’t his own crazy, nonsensical story this time. It was something about my life, the life I had once lived, something to do with the people from that life. I sat up straight, opened my eyes. The light in my dim tower changed suddenly. Finally, he started speaking again.
‘In the settlement of Nea Smyrna I found your father.’
I was confused. Who did he mean by ‘my father’? Did he mean the one who repaired the cars Edward Thomas-Cook brought from England, the one who seduced Edith while he was giving her driving lessons, the boatman Ali from Chesme? Or did he mean Grocer Akis, whom I knew as my father all my life? It was quite poss
ible, according to the story this senile spy was telling, that Juliette Lamarck had had my real father taken out by Cakircali’s gang. Which meant that it was Akis that Avinash was speaking of. My lips began to tremble.
‘No, I did not meet him in person. Mr Prodromakis died the year that I arrived there. I spoke with his neighbours. When he came to Greece, he settled first in Faliro; then he moved to Nea Smyrna, where he remained for the rest of his life.’
The trembling spread from my lips and took over my whole body. I held on to the iron bedstead to stop myself from falling over. It was the first time in fifty years that someone had brought me news from the life I had buried in the cemetery at Daragaci. My father had survived, had made it to Greece, had lived all alone in a squatter settlement, and had then died there. Where was my mother while all this was happening? Avinash must have read the question in my eyes, for he bowed his head. He swayed back and forth in the rocking chair. His body was so diminished, his feet didn’t reach the floor.
I got up from the bed, walked over to the rocking chair, grabbed hold of his wrinkled chin and turned his face to mine. The rocking ceased abruptly. The saggy flesh under his chin made Avinash look like a turtle. The only connection with that handsome, exotic-looking man I’d hit in the testicles in front of Kraemer’s a half-century ago was the spicy scent of distant lands that emanated from his skin. My eyes were bulging. I stared into his café-au-lait eyes, over which a dull curtain had fallen. Since he had come to tell me the truth, he was obliged to tell me what had happened to my mother – not Edith Lamarck, but the one who knew me as her daughter, who held me close to her heart, who raised me. Katina Yagcioglu.
‘The neighbours I talked to in Nea Smyrna said that Ms Katina, that is, your mother… unfortunately…’ He tried to escape my gaze by twisting his head towards the hatch that opened onto the stairs leading down from the tower. I held his chin and again turned his wizened face to mine. The curtain of death lowered itself over his eyes.
