The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

  The families of Irini Street grew closer. Their houses may have had doors but they were never shut. In winter a thick curtain hung down to keep the heat in and, during the summer, it was replaced by a slightly lighter one so that the house might catch a little of the breeze that blew in from the sea. These curtains meant that adults and children alike could pass in and out of each other’s houses without invitation. The children went round in a pack and the mothers found that they either had six children in their home or none. The relationship between them was more like one of siblings than of friends.

  It was a street that hummed with activity. Only Olga sometimes found herself without a task. She was a lady in waiting to resume her role in the mansion, but was in no hurry even to do that. Once a week she was taken to the house to make decisions on paint colours, and had spent the past year instructing tradespeople in the decoration of her new home. Painters, curtain-makers, furniture-makers, rug-makers, all of them filed through the house on the seafront. As they signed a contract to confirm an order, they would all be given a surprise.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ Olga would say, smiling sweetly at them.

  Everyone in the upper echelons of Thessaloniki society wanted things yesterday. Except for Kyria Komninos. In a place where the rich got richer and the poor appeared to get poorer, the ones with money seemed to make increasingly stringent demands. The tradespeople all commented on it. They were puzzled by this woman who wanted them to work at a leisurely pace and went away scratching their heads.

  The Komninos warehouses were thriving. The business had grown exponentially and Konstantinos was now impatient to be in his new home. Nearly ten years had passed since the fire and, though his life with Olga and Dimitri had settled into a pattern that suited him perfectly, one that had allowed him to focus entirely on his business, he now wanted the status of a spectacular home with a family installed within it.

  Dimitri had been taken to the new house several times. To him, it seemed dauntingly large. The huge rooms were bigger than his classroom, and the lofty ceilings reminded him of church. It seemed cold and dazzlingly light, and had a strange odour that he could not define.

  When he was telling Pavlina about it, he simply said, ‘It smelled white.’

  She tried to make him more enthusiastic, but her words fell on deaf ears.

  ‘You’ll have ever such a big bedroom,’ she told him. ‘And I’ll be cooking up some lovely treats for you in my new kitchen!’

  Dimitri began to dread the move to the grand house that was not his home, knowing that living there would bring about some major changes. For so many years, he had seen Elias, Isaac, Katerina and the twins every day. He knew there would be no more games of pares y nones or his favourite, los palicos.

  His father had also told him that he would be going to a new international school, where he would be learning French and meeting different children. Neither of these prospects filled him with great joy. He liked the friends he had and he did not want to learn the language of a strange country.

  Olga did not relish the notion of returning to her lonely life on the seafront either: she dreaded the solitude, the monaxia, and would miss the wonderful people who had taught her that loss, separation and expectation of hardship could make people stronger rather than weaker. Pavlina felt the same way and would especially miss the flow of harmless gossip, the koutsombolio, with the women of the street.

  The day came when they were finally packing to go. Although it was less than twenty minutes by foot, they may as well have been leaving for a foreign country for the emotions that stirred inside them. A handcart came to the door to collect the boxes that they had accrued over the years, and a shiny black car waited for them at the end of the road. The narrow width of Irini Street prevented it from being driven to the door but everyone was aware of it lurking there, waiting to take Olga to her old life and Dimitri to a new one. Dimitri solemnly shook the hands of his friends, but Elias, his ‘milk brother’, he hugged in a firm embrace. The women wept without shame as they said their farewells.

  Perhaps for the last time, the boy allowed his mother to take his hand as they walked away from their happy home.

  Although she had no certainty that Katerina was even alive, Zenia had continued to write to her. It was more than four years since they had both fled from Smyrna and their correspondence to each other lay undelivered in a sorting office in an Athens suburb. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of other undelivered letters lay stacked in piles, evidence of the huge number of people separated from their families or without permanent addresses.

  The operation was run by a meticulous, almost obsessional, postmaster who did everything he could to help correspondence reach its destination. An unmarried man of fifty-five who lived with his widowed mother, he had dedicated his life to the learning of foreign languages. He could read French, Italian, Bulgarian and English, and had learned several alphabets in order to decipher some other languages, all of them picked up from books studied by candlelight in the same gloomy room where he had been born many years before. Beneath his mop of thick silver hair was a brain of such multilingual brilliance that he was sometimes consulted by university professors and politicians for translations. He had no other ambition, however, than to carry out the task to which he was officially assigned: to make sure letters reached the right recipient. With the sheer volume of new arrivals into Greece and the general movement of population, he faced a great challenge.

  When space ran out, he had no choice but to take drastic measures. For him this was to open an envelope and invade the privacy of the writer. For a man with such meticulous manners, it was a last resort. If this was not successful, however, he was obliged to go one step further and dispose of the correspondence, which for him was acceptance of such total failure that he would not be able to sleep that night.

  Inside the massive warehouse with boxes stacked from floor to ceiling (each one with a place name), the postmaster always worked long into the night, usually reviewing the oldest mail. One day, his mind was working particularly lucidly, making connections and recalling letters that he knew were in the warehouse.

  Some of them were labelled according to postmark, some by destination, some by the name of the writer’s original home in Asia Minor. Occasionally he had a flash of inspiration and recalled precisely where he had seen a letter that might match with another name.

  Katerina had addressed her envelopes: ‘Zenia Sarafoglou, Athens’. The postmaster had also noticed letters to ‘Katerina Sarafoglou, Once of Smyrna’. Were these two connected? There was every chance they were not, as the name was not unusual, but he carefully opened letters from each package and noted the address from which they had been written.

  He saw that the letters written to Katerina were written from the area of Athens which predominantly housed the refugees from Smyrna and was known as ‘New Smyrna’. He then carefully slit open the top of one of the letters that had a Thessaloniki postmark. Inside, he saw the large but legible characters written by a child. At the top was an address, ‘5 Irini Street’, and at the bottom, a signature, ‘Katerina’.

  His heart lurched a little. There was no certainty that they matched, but like a detective who follows an inspirational hunch to solve a crime, he found his palms were starting to sweat. It was worth trying. He forwarded the letters for Katerina to a colleague in Thessaloniki with the instruction: ‘Try this address.’

  A few weeks later, Eugenia heard a knock on the door.

  ‘I know the surname isn’t yours,’ said the postman, ‘but . . .’ He held the package towards her without letting it go. ‘Do you know a Sarafoglou?’ he asked.

  She looked at the name and nodded.

  ‘Someone’s got some reading to do then!’ he said cheerfully, before turning away.

  There were at least thirty or forty letters bound together with string. Eugenia scrutinised the elegant handwriting. She sighed. It was what Katerina had been waiting for all these years. Eugenia had encouraged
her to keep the memory of her real family, but now that she held the key to their reunion in her hand, she realised how desperately fond she had become of the little girl. For weeks at a time she forgot that Katerina was not her own flesh and blood. The letters were put up on a high shelf next to the icon where a small lamp permanently glowed and for several days they sat there, untouched.

  One afternoon, a few days later, Eugenia went into the nearby church of Agios Nikolaos Orfanos, racked with guilt that she had not yet given Katerina the letters. The excuse she made to herself was that they might upset the little girl. She begged the Panagia for guidance.

  Back in the house, she began to prepare an evening meal but all the while the letters were at the forefront of her mind. She glanced up to make sure they were still there but something else immediately caught her eye. For the first time since she had lit its flame some four years before, the oil lamp next to the icon had gone out. It was a sign. God must be angry with her for withholding the correspondence.

  The girls came in an hour or so later. After the long walk back from school they were all hungry. As soon as they had eaten, Eugenia told the twins to go upstairs and, trying to conceal her anxiety, she told Katerina she had something for her.

  ‘Some letters have arrived for you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t opened them, as they are addressed to you, but I think they might be from your mother.’

  ‘My mother!’ Katerina cried out. ‘Where are they? Where are they?’

  Eugenia had already cut the string and put the letters in order of the dated postmark.

  ‘Here they are,’ she said, placing them on the table in two piles.

  Katerina stared at them, suddenly seized with fear. They were from a woman she no longer knew and at that moment she realised she had no memory of her mother’s face. If they collided in the street, she might not recognise her.

  Eugenia began to read the correspondence to her, occasionally omitting a line or two if she felt it was the right thing to do. Although Katerina’s reading was improving, it was beyond her to read the uneven scrawl that ran across these hundreds of pages.

  The first dozen or so of her mother’s letters were written with cheerful breeziness, full of trivial observations about the journey they had made from Smyrna to Athens. They had been written without belief that they would ever reach their destination and the tone was as if they had taken a pleasure trip and were soon to be reunited. Each page contained chatty references to things they would do when they were together again, descriptions of the dresses she was planning to make for Katerina, the bonnets and bibs she was going to edge for the baby and new themes for her embroidery.

  She described what had happened to herself and Artemis when they had arrived in Athens. It was very different from Katerina’s experience with Eugenia, except for one factor: the hands that reached out to them from the humanitarian organisations.

  ‘Without those,’ wrote Zenia, ‘life would have been impossible.’

  ‘You can’t imagine where they have taken us! It’s not like an ordinary home at all. It is called the Opera House and it’s one of the grandest buildings in the whole of Athens. This is where they put on plays, but instead of saying the words, they sing them. And the singers all wear big gowns and the people who come here to watch them wear very fine clothes too (except that while we are living here, they are not putting on their shows). Everything is red and gold: red carpet and red chairs and huge red velvet curtains with golden embroidery and the biggest tassels in the whole world. Just imagine what a giant’s house would look like if that giant was a king and that’s where we are. Everything is huge and we are going to stay in this fancy building until they find somewhere more permanent for us!’

  Life in the opera house, according to these letters, was vibrant, sociable and comfortably cushioned. Enthralled, Katerina listened to her mother’s descriptions of this palace that was inhabited by ordinary people who had been invited in by a benign but outsized monarch. The image of the colossal cauldrons from which their meals were ladled completed this picture of a life lived under the friendly patronage of an invisible giant. Not once did Zenia mention the squalid reality.

  ‘Of course, we are not inside our Opera House all day. Sometimes we go out into the street and explore the city of Athens.’

  Zenia also avoided a truthful description of the streets in the overcrowded capital. She was careful to leave out the details of the begging and prostitution, although they would not have been unfamiliar to Katerina. Thessaloniki had many of the same problems. Instead she talked about the big squares and monuments that even children who had been brought up in Smyrna had seen in picture books.

  ‘Up on a big rock overlooking the city is one of the most ancient and most important buildings in the whole world. It’s called the Parthenon and was once a temple. It was on the cover of a picture book you had when you were little. When the sun sets it is bathed in an amber light and seems to be on fire.’

  Katerina sat at the little table around which everything in this house revolved and savoured every word. Sometimes the voice seemed so close, it was as if her mother were speaking. At other times it was like listening to such distant music, she had to strain to catch its notes.

  The correspondence was peppered with names of people from Smryna and Katerina had a vague recollection of a few of them. Within the story of Zenia’s current life, they became familiar once again.

  After the first dozen or so relentlessly cheerful letters, which were written in the months immediately following their departure from Smyrna, there was a break in the correspondence.

  Following that hiatus, the letters described a new ‘village’ that they had moved to. Zenia admitted that they were all happy in the end to move out of the giant’s home.

  ‘He allowed it to become too crowded,’ she wrote, ‘and a new place has been constructed for us, with much more space. It’s like a normal village, with streets of small houses. We have to share with a mother and her daughter but our girls are getting along reasonably well with each other.’

  Eugenia picked up the nuance – that the children played with each other happily and naturally, but the mothers were not sure about each other. Such enforced coexistence was rarely happy for strangers.

  One of the very few men in this widow-heavy community asked Zenia to marry him. Angelos Pantazoglou lived in the next-door dwelling with his three children (his wife had died at the birth of the last).

  With more than twice as many women as men among the refugees, Zenia knew that this was a unique opportunity to provide her daughters with a father and so, one Friday, for the second time in her life, she drank from the common cup and felt the fleeting touch of the wedding crowns, the stephana, on her head. In her letter to Katerina, she described to her daughter the obese priest who wheezed so much that he could scarcely walk the compulsory three laps of the altar.

  Letters written less than a year later reported news of a son, ‘a brother for you and your sister,’ she wrote with enthusiasm, ‘and of course your other siblings too.’

  Eugenia read the package of letters almost without pause. Its narrative seemed to demand a continuous flow. Katerina did not interrupt once, except when Eugenia repeated the names of her step-siblings and she repeated them back at her: Petros, Froso, Margarita and now, a half-brother, baby Manos.

  The letters always ended with the words: ‘If this letter finds you, Katerina, I hope it will bring you to join us. I tell Artemis about you and she asks about you every day. I think it’s hard for her to understand that she has a sister who is not here.’

  When Eugenia came to the end of the final letter it was nearly midnight. Usually Katerina would have been asleep by this time but that night she was wide awake, almost beside herself with excitement.

  ‘We’ve found her!’ she said. ‘I’m going to see my mother again!’

  Eugenia forced a smile. Inside she was weeping.

  Within days, a postman had found Zenia in Athens and delivered the packag
e of letters from Katerina that she had been writing for years. They did not need to be put in date order, the development of the handwriting from the very early stages to almost adult fluency guided the reader as to which letters came first and which last.

  They were full of contented ramblings about her life in Thessaloniki and when Katerina described the woman who had been looking after her all this time, Zenia felt a sudden, urgent pang of jealousy. The feeling recurred each time she saw the name ‘Eugenia’ written on the page; she could not help it.

  During the course of the correspondence she came to know the Karayanidis, Komninos and Moreno families and many others who peopled the colourful old street in which they lived. The child’s passion for the vibrant and colourful city of Thessaloniki leaped from every word of every page.

  In Katerina’s final and most recent letter she had even enclosed a handkerchief on which her mother’s name was carefully embroidered. Zenia smiled, glad to see that her daughter carried on a family tradition. Her own sewing skills were now confined to putting buttons on cheap shirts, which were then packaged up for a wholesaler and sold to a market stall.

  ‘Can we write, can we write?’ Katerina nagged for the next few days, excited that she would finally be sending a letter that she knew was going to arrive.

  Her letter was a list of questions. She wanted to find out more about her brothers and sisters, how to find the house and when she might come. Eugenia enclosed a letter with Katerina’s, formally introducing herself and asking Zenia what arrangements they should make.

  Now that they had the full address, the letter did not take long to reach its destination, and within a few weeks the postman was knocking on the door again in Irini Street.

  Zenia had addressed her reply to Eugenia but inside the envelope there were two letters: one for Eugenia and one for Katerina.

  Before the child returned from school, Eugenia read hers. Zenia explained the facts of her situation. She now had five children to look after. Her husband gave preferential treatment to the four that were his own, but little Artemis was pushed around not only by her stepfather but by some of the other children too. When Zenia tried to point out this unfairness, she was given a sharp slap. This had begun to leave her bruised but the marks were always under her clothes. Although the walls that separated their flimsy accommodation were thin, there was no interference in such matters between families. Behind their own front door, everyone’s business was considered their own.