The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

  Pavlina could speak with some authority. She had borne four children before the age of twenty-two and after the first three births she was living proof that the dramatic expansion of the female body during pregnancy could be reversed. Following her fourth pregnancy, however, her body finally lost its elasticity. Olga glanced at the comfortable figure of her housekeeper, who looked more like someone on the point of giving birth than she did herself.

  ‘I hope you’re right, Pavlina,’ she said, putting aside the cloth to which she was slowly and ineptly adding an edging.

  ‘When exactly are you planning to get that finished?’ teased Pavlina, as she picked up the tiny sheet to examine her mistress’s handiwork. ‘The baby is due this month, isn’t he? Or is it next year?’

  In six months, Olga’s attempts at embroidery had scarcely progressed. The needle slipped through her sweating fingers and several times she had pricked herself and droplets of blood had stained the creamy linen.

  ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?

  Pavlina smiled and took it from her. She could not deny this statement. Olga’s hands were not made for embroidery. Though her fingers were slim and elegant, she had no knack with a needle. For her, it was purely an activity with which to kill time.

  ‘I’ll launder it and then finish it off for you, shall I?’

  ‘Thank you, Pavlina. Would you mind?’

  During all these months of sickness, Olga had been uncomfortable, but in the early hours of that August morning these feelings of restlessness overpowered her. She could not lie still even for a minute. Her back ached more when she was sitting than standing and the pains in her abdomen, which had been mild for a week or so, intensified. Every few moments she almost passed out with the pain. Finally her time had come.

  Although it was a Saturday, Konstantinos left for his offices at six thirty, as usual.

  ‘Goodbye, Olga,’ he said, coming into the bedroom during a moment when the contractions had receded. ‘I’ll be at the showroom. Pavlina can send for me if you need.’

  She attempted a smile as he put his hand on hers. It was meant to reassure her, but it was as fleeting as a feather’s touch, a perfunctory gesture that made her feel less loved rather than more. He seemed oblivious to her pain, and appeared not to have noticed the soft moans that she had been making when he entered the room.

  Soon she was howling, as the waves of pain overwhelmed her, gripping on to Pavlina until the housekeeper’s arm bore her fingerprints. Surely such terrible agony could only mean the end of life, not the beginning.

  Passers-by heard the occasional agonising scream but such a sound was common in this city, and the noise was swallowed up in the general cacophony of trams, carts and street traders. At ten o’clock, Pavlina sent for Dr Papadakis, who confirmed that the baby would soon be arriving. Konstantinos Komninos’ position in the community meant that the doctor would stay until the baby arrived safely.

  In the final hours of labour Olga did not, for a moment, let go of Pavlina’s hand. Without it she feared being drawn inexorably into a dark tunnel of pain that would take her away from the world.

  With her spare hand, Pavlina mopped her mistress’s brow with cool water, which was constantly brought up from the kitchen.

  ‘Try to get her to relax a little,’ the doctor advised Pavlina.

  The housekeeper knew from her own experiences that when pain was ripping your body into two, this was an absurd suggestion. She would like to tell him what she thought, but there was no point. She bit her lip. The man was in his seventies. How ever many thousands of babies he might have delivered in his career, he could never even get close to imagining what Olga was experiencing.

  The bed was wet with sweat, with water and with the liquid that burst from her body like a flood. Olga felt herself drifting almost out of consciousness, and thought of the nightmare she had had all those weeks ago – and which had often recurred in some form during the past few days.

  The doctor had settled himself into a comfortable chair and sat reading a newspaper, occasionally consulting his pocket watch then glancing over at Olga. It seemed as though he was monitoring her, or perhaps he was just calculating how long it would be before he would be eating his lunch.

  With the heavy curtains almost shut, the room was in near darkness. He held his newspaper up to catch the shaft of light that found its way in. Only when her screams seemed as though they might shatter the mirror did he actually get up. Without getting close enough to endanger the perfection of his pristine, pale suit, he began to issue some more instructions.

  ‘I can see the baby’s head. You need to push now, Kyria Komninos.’

  Nothing seemed more natural to her. Every part of her being felt this urge, but at the same time, it seemed an impossibility, as though she must turn her body inside out.

  Perhaps an hour went by. For Pavlina it seemed a day, and for Olga an unquantifiable amount of time during which her life was measured only by waves of pain. She entered a state of delirium. She did not know that she had been close to cardiac arrest, and that the baby’s distressed heart was within a beat of failure. She was aware only of the pain. It was all that seemed real for these final moments of her labour.

  A baby swam out of the darkness into the half-light of the room. And screamed. Olga’s pains had ceased so she knew the high wail did not belong to her. This was a new sound.

  She lay still and silent for a few moments. Breathless. Tears of exhaustion and relief coursing down her face. Olga became aware that the attention of the two people looking after her had shifted away and was focused on something across the room. Their backs were turned towards her and instinctively she knew not to disturb them.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and listened to their quiet murmurings. She had no reason to be concerned. Olga felt the presence of a fourth person in that room. She knew he was there.

  ‘Kyria Olga . . .’

  Olga saw Pavlina at her bedside. Against the whiteness of her blouse and the ampleness of her bosom, the small white bundle was almost invisible.

  ‘Your . . . baby.’ She almost choked on the words. ‘Here is your baby. Your son. Your boy, Kyria Olga!’

  And there, indeed, he was. Pavlina lowered the tiny thing down into Olga’s open arms and mother and son looked at each other for the first time.

  Olga could not speak. A powerful surge of love flowed out of her. Never had she felt anything as strong as the unconditional adoration that she felt for this small being in her arms. In that moment of meeting eyes, an unbreakable bond was made.

  A message was sent to Konstantinos Komninos and, when he arrived, Dr Papadakis was waiting for him downstairs.

  ‘You have a son and heir,’ he informed him proudly, as though he had been responsible for the entire procedure.

  ‘That’s excellent news,’ responded Komninos, in the tone of a man being informed of the safe delivery of some Chinese silk.

  ‘Congratulations!’ added Papadakis. ‘Mother and baby are both well, so I’ll be leaving now.’

  It was almost three and the doctor was anxious to be on his way. He always hoped to have Saturdays free, and certainly did not want to miss the recital that was being given that afternoon by a visiting French pianist. It was an all-Chopin programme and Thessaloniki society was buzzing with excitement.

  ‘I’ll come by and see them next week, but let me know if you need me before then, Kyrios Komninos,’ he said with his automatic smile.

  The two men shook hands and before the doctor had let himself out of the house, Komninos was already halfway up the sweeping staircase. It was time to see his son for himself.

  By now Pavlina had helped Olga wash and had freshly braided her hair. Clean sheets had been put on the bed, and the baby was asleep in the crib beside it. It was a picture of peace and organisation, exactly how Konstantinos liked to see things.

  Without even looking at his wife, he walked across the room and gazed down silently at the swaddled newborn.

  ‘Is
n’t he beautiful?’ asked Pavlina.

  ‘I can’t really see him properly,’ he replied, with a hint of dissatisfaction.

  ‘You’ll see plenty of him when he wakes up,’ interjected Pavlina.

  Komninos gave her a disapproving look.

  ‘What I mean is, it would be better to let him have his sleep for now. And as soon as he is awake I will bring him to you. It would be better not to disturb him.’

  ‘Very well, Pavlina,’ he retorted. ‘Could you leave us a moment?’

  As soon as Pavlina was out of the room, he looked at Olga.

  ‘Is he . . .?’

  ‘Yes, Konstantinos, he is.’

  After all her years of failure to conceive, Olga had known her husband’s greatest fear: that when she finally managed to produce a child, there would be something wrong with it. Her anxiety over what Konstantinos would actually do in those circumstances could now be put to one side.

  ‘He’s absolutely perfect,’ she said simply.

  Satisfied, Komninos left the room. He had business to attend to.

  Chapter Three

  ON THE SAME sweltering Saturday afternoon, perhaps even at the very moment when little Dimitri Komninos emerged into the world, a woman began to cook her family’s meagre dinner. She lived in a very different kind of house from the Komninos mansion. Like hundreds of others, her home was in a densely populated quarter, just within the old city walls, in the north-west of the city. It was where the poorest people of Thessaloniki lived: Christians, Muslims, Jews and refugees, crowded on top of each other in streets where there was little money, but plenty of life.

  Some of these dwellings were built into the city walls themselves, and the space between them was hardly enough to hang out a single shirt for drying. Families were large, money was scarce and work not always easy to find, and in this home there were four almost grown up, but not yet married, children. Such a number was typical. The mother worked full time to keep her small tribe fed and clean, and when there was no cooking pot on the fire, there was a cauldron of hot water. There was a constant need for it, for washing the filthy clothes and bodies after each day’s work at the port.

  The three sons slept in the main living room, while she and her husband occupied the only bedroom, along with their sixteen-year-old daughter, who slept on a couch at the end of the bed. There was no other reasonable arrangement until she could be married, which was highly improbable for a girl with no prospect of a dowry.

  The mistress of the house bought wisely and never indulgently, purchasing most of her ingredients from the vendors who came in from the countryside with their baskets of onions, potatoes and beans. Meat was a luxury eaten only on special feast days, but often there were sheeps’ entrails to float in the soup, given away by the butchers if they were unsold at the end of a day. That afternoon there was such a soup simmering, which they would eat later with chunks of coarse bread that her husband had been told to fetch on his way home. Sweat ran down her bare, muscular arms as she stoked the flames beneath the simmering pot. At the end of every Saturday, the men of the family met up with cousins and nephews in a smoke-filled kafenion to drink and chew over the week’s events. With war raging all around them, in Europe and beyond, there was always plenty to discuss.

  The family kept an old mule in the lower ground floor of the house, along with a goat to make them self-sufficient in milk and cheese and, as well as a thousand uninvited flies, a few chickens shared the sordid living space, making their nesting places in the soiled hay. They knew to keep well clear of the mule’s hind legs and instead picked at scraps between the goat’s cloven hoofs. When the kitchen was not full of cooking smells, the odour of animal dung pervaded instead.

  It was into this dark and fetid space that a small spark from the fire found its way that afternoon. A thousand times before, an ember such as this had been spat out by the crackling wood and then floated slowly down to the floor, where it glowed for a moment and then died. This one, however, flew with the accuracy of a well-aimed arrow through the narrow space between the floorboards and in its trajectory seemed to pick up heat from its own gathering speed.

  It dropped onto the mule’s rump, where it was instantly flicked off by its tail. Had the rhythm of the animal’s continuously swishing tail wafted the ember to the left, it would have landed on the damp urine-soaked floor. Instead, it travelled to the right and landed on the straw bedding. It did not stay on the surface, but slipped a few layers down, close to where the hen sat incubating her eggs and creating the perfect conditions to nurture the warmth of the still glowing spark.

  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.