Eugenia laughed. ‘Poor child.’
Katerina listened. A vivid image of Dimitri’s strange life in his privileged home came to her.
A question began to form in her mind about the Morenos. With their huge business and all its rich customers, why did they live in Irini Street with people like themselves? She could not help wondering. Surely they could have a huge mansion, like the Komninos family?
She plucked up the courage to ask.
‘Why don’t you live somewhere like Dimitri? Somewhere bigger and grander?’
‘Why would we want to do that?’ Roza answered, feigning surprise at the question.
Katerina was a little embarrassed, but felt compelled to continue. ‘Well . . . you have such a big workshop . . . and such an important name in this city. And all those grand ladies wear your clothes, and so do their husbands.’
Roza Moreno knew exactly what the girl was getting at. The handful of people who visited the workshop and also knew where they lived were usually bemused. The Moreno family had prospered but had never moved from their small house in a scruffy street in the old town.
‘I’ll tell you, my dear. And it’s very simple,’ she said. ‘My husband runs the business as much for the people who work there as for himself. We only employ the best tailors and seamstresses in Thessaloniki, so we pay them more than the average salary.’
Katerina nodded as Kyria Moreno continued.
‘Lots of them are related to us, so they are as determined as we are to keep the reputation of the company that bears their family name. But,’ she paused, ‘we don’t only employ Jews – there are a couple of Greeks! We have always made sure of that. There used to be plenty of Muslims with us too and we still miss them.’
‘I shouldn’t think many other workshops have as much light and space as yours,’ said Eugenia.
‘Most of them are much smaller,’ answered Roza. ‘Saul has spent all the profits from the past ten years on improving conditions, so instead of having a bigger home, we have a bigger workshop!’
‘And the new sewing machines must have cost a lot of money,’ said Eugenia.
‘Yes,’ Roza said. ‘It was a big investment, but everyone looks after their own as though it actually belongs to them.’ She took Katerina’s hand. ‘So you see, we don’t need to live like our customers any more than we need to dress like them,’ she said, gesturing to her own clothing, a full skirt and plain blouse, which bore no relation to the new European styles.
By now they had turned into Irini Street. Here was the rest of the answer: the street where nobody looked down on anybody, whether they were old Greeks, ‘new’ Greeks from Asia Minor, Greek-speaking Jews or Jews who spoke only Ladino.
Simultaneously, all three of them had the same thought. Why would any of them want to swap their lives or their homes with Olga Komninos? They pictured her, unsmiling and alone, in her mansion on the sea.
A week later, Katerina went to school for the last time. The following day, Eugenia woke her at six thirty. In ten minutes she was washed, dressed and ready to leave the house.
Her heart beating with excitement, she stepped out into the street. Kyrios Moreno and his sons were waiting for her in the pale dawn light.
‘Here she is!’ Elias said, enthusiastically. ‘Ready? Shall we go?’
Today was the beginning of Katerina’s life in the working world, her first day as a seamstress, a modistra.
‘Yes,’ she said, proudly. ‘I’m ready!’
Chapter Fifteen
KATERINA BEGAN HER full training under the wing of Saul’s aunt, who was a strict but knowledgeable teacher. For forty years, Esther Moreno had been working in the business and it was her life as much as it was her nephew’s. An unmarried lady, she had not missed a single day of work in four decades.
The first stage of the apprenticeship involved learning about the fabrics, what were their limitations, strengths and uses, from the men’s tweeds and twills through to the ladies’ silks and cottons. She was given swatches from more than one hundred rolls of fabric and told to experiment on them and to try different sized needles and varying thicknesses of thread so that she would know which was best to use.
‘Only by feeling these things between your own fingers and seeing the result for yourself will you know which is the most suitable. There is no room for error once you are working on a garment. So you have to make your mistakes now.’
Esther Moreno’s knowledge of customers’ expectations was based on decades of unbroken experience. She was humourless but usually right, and the novice hung on her every word.
For three entire weeks, Katerina sat quietly in a corner with a pile of materials of every weight, from velvet to toile, and saw what was possible with each one, which weight of silk or yarn worked best. Never before had she had such an opportunity to feel so many different variations of texture, quality and thickness of material. Nothing distracted her from this task.
After that she was sent to observe the measuring and fitting process (ladies only, of course) and then for two days she sat in the cutting room. This was where every drachma of profit could be lost. With the price of good fabric being so high, every square centimetre of it had to be well used. If there was an error with the direction in which the fabric lay, a careless slip with the shears, or the arrangement of pattern pieces was not economical, they would make a loss on the garment.
‘If a mistake is made at this stage, the garment will cost us more than we can sell it for to the customer,’ Esther said bluntly.
Katerina picked up a pair of the unwieldy, man-sized shears and hoped she would never be involved in cutting.
Next was the sewing room, where Katerina was greeted by the deafening but rhythmic clatter. They sat down together at one of the machines and Katerina ran her fingers over its cool metal curves. They were a work of art, each of these Singers, with fine etching on the silver plate that concealed the mechanism and exquisitely painted flowers and fronds over the main body. Esther Moreno demonstrated to Katerina how to thread the machine and work the treadle with her feet, but she was alarmed by the sensation that the needle was running away with her and hoped that her days at Moreno & Sons were not going to be spent among these machines.
‘So now, the finishing room,’ Esther said. ‘This is where your imagination can take you anywhere you allow it.’
Katerina had dreamed of this room since her last visit. All the women looked up as they came in, and smiled.
‘Now, there are rules when you are tailoring and fitting,’ said Esther. ‘You are almost governed by mathematics and rules of proportion and, to some extent, the unique and often curious shape of the human body, but . . .’
Katerina was trying to focus on what the woman was saying, but found the scientific way she spoke about the body rather curious. After a few moments her concentration returned and Esther was still talking.
‘. . . there are no limits, no rules on what you can do to embellish a dress,’ she was saying. ‘There are certain things that need to be established with the customer beforehand. You have to estimate the amount of time you will need, ascertain the price of materials, do a cost calculation and submit that to me so that I can assess the profitability.’
Katerina had no idea what she was talking about. All she wanted to do was sew, and she was transfixed by the row of bows that one of the women was attaching all the way down the back of a full-length ball gown.
She nodded. It seemed the correct response. Clearly Esther Moreno did not expect her to say very much.
‘I understand that Kyrios Moreno is putting you in here, so I’ll leave Kyria Raphael to look after you now.’
‘Thank you so much, Kyria Esther,’ Katerina said politely.
Esther Moreno was already opening the door to leave. She was much more at home in her office, where she dealt with the estimates and invoices for the business, and everyone in the room breathed a sigh of relief when she had gone.
Katerina was immediately put to work
on some beading. Only young eyes and small fingers like hers could pick up the tiny crystals and grasp the size 9 needle that was needed to sew them. By the end of the day she had run them all round the hem of the gown and the other women gathered to admire how well she had done.
‘It’s so neat!’
‘And even!’
‘Perfect, Katerina!’
She was almost embarrassed by the lavishness of their praise, but it told her what she needed to know. She was good enough.
From that day on, she thrived, and was always called on to do the tasks that required the finest work. She could do embroidery, appliqué, edging and ruching with stitches that were almost invisible to the naked eye, and the evenness of her stitches, whatever the size, was remarkable. Whether she was doing satin stitch, feather stitch, herringbone or chain stitch, in and out went her needle with the same mechanical beat as the machines in the adjacent room.
Sometimes even the act of threading a needle evoked powerful feelings of nostalgia within her and it was during these long hours in the workshop that she thought most of her mother. It was always the same moment that returned to her, one in which their lives had been, in her childlike view of the world, perfect. In that frozen particle of time, her mother was sitting in a very upright chair, next to a window and her back was straight and stiff. She was embroidering something with gold thread and, as the light streamed in through the window, it glistened. Her work, an ecclesiastical robe, was spread across her lap.
‘Never slouch,’ she had always told Katerina, and whenever this image came to her, she automatically adjusted her position.
Day to day, Katerina was protected from the seediness of much of Thessaloniki. The cobbled alleyways that led to and from the Moreno workshop in Filipou Street did not take her past the makeshift shacks that still housed many who had lost their homes in the 1917 fire. Nor did they take her anywhere near the wooden huts that were incongruously squeezed between magnificent apartment buildings and rows of middle-class villas, where a few refugees from Asia Minor still lived like gypsies. Nor did she ever find herself near the railway station, which was possibly the worst area of all. In the crowded ‘streets’ of tin huts, sewage and rats ran along side by side and every other door opened into a hash den or brothel.
Though the houses were simple and close-packed, as if carelessly erected by a child, Irini Street was affluent compared with many other parts of Thessaloniki. Never more so than at this time, this was a city of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. At one end of the scale were the affluent bankers and merchants, the kind of people who comprised the Moreno clientele and the Komninos customers, and at the other, the abjectly poor who dwelled in slums and relied on soup kitchens. The families of Irini Street were somewhere in between.
Unemployment was high, but even among those who had jobs, dissatisfaction continually bubbled to the surface. Unlike Saul Moreno, most employers did not bother to keep their workers happy and the late 1920s had seen continual protest. Tobacco workers were a huge source of labour militancy and fought over conditions and pay, but they were not alone. Transport workers, printers, bakers and butchers all took industrial action. This unsettled atmosphere of poverty and exploitation was a perfect breeding ground for communism.
The Nationalists were vehemently hostile to the growing Left, but they had another target as well: the Jews, whom they accused of not assimilating into Greek life.
Throughout the decade, the right-wing newspaper, Makedonia, had stirred up hatred and suspicion against the Jews, promulgating rumours that they planned to take over the state. It reminded readers that in 1912, when the city ceased to be part of the Ottoman Empire and became part of Greece, the city’s Jews had given the Greek army a cool welcome. Some did not even speak the Greek language and continued to use Ladino. In other words, they were neither patriotic, nor truly Greek. The list of their ‘crimes’ was a long one, according to Makedonia.
It was a time of brewing resentment, and widespread poverty among the Asia Minor Greeks had helped to foment it. One day, Saul Moreno arrived at the workshop very early, as usual, and found the word ‘JEW’ splashed across the door in red paint. Before the first of his staff had arrived, he had bought a can of black paint and repainted the entire door. Everyone was puzzled by his sudden desire to change its colour but he did not want to disturb his staff by giving them the real reason.
‘I just felt it would make a change,’ he said, but in a few weeks he would repaint it his favourite green.
Kyrios Moreno tried to protect his wife. Each day on his way to work, he bought one of the plethora of newspapers that crowded the newsstand, but if there was a reference to anti-Semitic activity he quickly got rid of it. He also kept very quiet about the hostile stares he sometimes noticed and did not tell Roza that one or two of their customers had taken their business elsewhere.
At the end of June, there was some major news that reached him even before he read it in a newspaper.
Two of his tailors lived in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood known as the Campbell district. On the previous night, their homes had been torched. The men were still in shock but wanted to tell the story to their colleagues. Twenty people gathered round in the cutting room, appalled by what they heard but hungry for a first-hand account. It seemed that a crowd of Asia Minor refugees, mostly from the down-at-heel areas nearby, had been responsible.
‘To start with, we barricaded ourselves in. It seemed the best thing to do, if we wanted to protect our homes and keep safe as well.’
‘But it didn’t turn out that way . . .’ said his neighbour.
‘They were on the rampage.’
‘Like mad men!’
‘As soon as they set light to the first building, we had to get out. Fast. So everyone ran. Literally fled with what they could carry.’
‘Some people lost everything! Workshops, homes, everything!’
‘We were lucky to get out alive!’
‘And they attacked two other areas as well, you know!’
The incident shocked Jews and Greeks alike. There was a trial of some of the perpetrators, including the editor of Makedonia, who had whipped up so much ill will against the Jews. Many Jews made plans to emigrate, even one of the Moreno tailors. If he could no longer feel secure in his own bed, he was leaving. The following month, with a few dozen other families, he departed for Palestine.
Saul Moreno was determined not to allow these events to affect his business. He took out full-page advertisements in some of the most right-wing newspapers and, with their permission, reproduced testimonials from some of his wealthy and high-profile clients.
Each of the advertisements ran the line: ‘Let us dress you top to toe.’ They used an illustration of an elegant couple, the man in evening dress and the woman in a long, beaded gown. The woman in the picture bore an uncanny resemblance to Olga Komninos.
At the foot of the page, in large, confident letters were the words: ‘MORENO & SONS, THE TOP TAILORS IN THESSALONIKI.’
The advertisements were a display of confidence, a gesture of defiance directed against those who wished them ill.
There were other ways in which Saul Moreno kept the morale of his workers high. He bought a gramophone player. It was played for an hour at the end of each afternoon, and the women loved the moment when he came in to wind it up. From the second the needle landed with a ‘crump’ on the record and the sound crackled into the room, the atmosphere lightened.
The collection of recordings was limited, but they usually began with one of Haim Effendi’s Sephardic songs from Turkey and always ended with their favourite, Roza Eskenazi. Their busy hands worked in time to the rhythms of this music.
Over the clatter of their sewing machines, the workers in the adjacent room smiled when they heard the women singing at full volume.
Esther Moreno disapproved of the music and the holiday atmosphere it created, convinced that productivity slackened off when it was playing. She was wrong. If anything it made the wom
en in less of a hurry to pack up and go home. Katerina was among those who particularly loved the music and became word-perfect in every song. There was no gramophone at home.
Katerina’s slim fingers were becoming increasingly nimble and her execution of some of the most difficult techniques improved. Sometimes, on the finer fabrics, there were seams that could not be adequately done by machine and she would do them by hand. The handiwork on her gowns became the most sought after in the city.
‘You can wear her dresses inside out,’ her wealthy customers boasted.
It was true. Her seams were perfect, and even the pattern on the reverse of her beading was sometimes more beautiful than the beading itself.
One day she was asked to finish a pale yellow crêpe dress. It had been tailored for someone with the narrowest waist and Katerina had been asked to sew on the twenty-five or so self-covered buttons that ran down the front, and to make the looped buttonholes. The challenge would not have been so great if they were not the size of glove buttons.
‘It’s for Kyria Komninos,’ Saul Moreno told her.
Katerina knew she was not meant to make personal comments about clients or their choices. Discretion and tact were prerequisites of the job, but Katerina could not help making a comment.
‘She is so slim! Slimmer than ever!’
It shocked her to imagine how thin Olga had become. In her mind, such slimness was usually associated with illness or starvation, but she knew the latter could not be the cause. Even if there were thousands of people without enough to eat in this city, everyone knew that the Komninos business was going from strength to strength.
‘Is she . . .?’
‘What?’
‘In good health?’
‘One of the fitters went to her house to measure her, and didn’t mention anything about her being ill. In fact, when you’ve finished, would you mind delivering it for me?’
‘Of course,’ said Katerina, trying not to look overeager.
‘Kyrios Komninos wants her to have it by Saturday.’
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