Those Who Are Loved

by Victoria Hislop

  A few minutes passed. The sun had gone down now and streetlamps were coming on. Themis then leant across to touch Popi’s hand.

  ‘Why don’t we go out for coffee?’ she whispered. ‘Then we’ll go into the little church. There’s something I always do on my birthday.’

  ‘Pray?’ Popi said with surprise, knowing that her grandmother was not especially devout.

  ‘No, agápi mou. I light some candles.’

  ‘Didn’t you have enough on your cake?’ teased Popi.

  Themis smiled.

  ‘Who are they for?’ Nikos asked keenly.

  ‘Come with me and I’ll tell you,’ she said, looking at Nikos, as ever mildly thrown by the strong resemblance to the man after whom he had been named.

  During the course of that day, with her family crammed into the small apartment, Themis had reflected with some regret that she had nothing to bequeath her children and grandchildren. There was little of any worth except the battered table around which the family had been eating for generations.

  Or was there perhaps another kind of legacy? She suddenly realised, now that Giorgos was absent in all but body, that there were things she would like to tell them. Her life story was not an heirloom, but it was all she had and she would give it to these two young people. She loved all of her grandchildren equally but had special affection for Popi because she had seen her almost every day since she was born. For Nikos, she had a particular soft spot, even though he only visited once a year.

  They quickly got ready to leave, Nikos helping his grandmother into her cardigan while Popi threw on her faded red thrift-shop coat.

  Nikos would be getting a plane back to the US the following morning and Themis insisted he have some fresh baklava and proper Greek coffee before he left. They had all eaten copiously at lunchtime, but he could not refuse and soon they were at the local zacharoplasteío.

  Once they were seated, Themis began to talk.

  Chapter One

  1930

  THE SWISH OF a hem against her cheek, the vibration of floorboards as her siblings ran around, the clatter of china from somewhere unseen and the sight of her mother’s brown, buckled shoes, moulded around misshapen feet. These were Themis’ early memories.

  With a small mansion, a husband at sea for months at a time and four children, Eleftheria Koralis was constantly engaged in domestic tasks. She had no time for play. The little one spent her early years in a state of happy neglect, and grew up believing she could make herself invisible.

  Eleftheria already owned the two-storey neo-classical house in Antigonis Street when she married Pavlos. It had been her late mother’s dowry. The exterior had been designed to impress, with no thought for restraint. It had a grand balcony, ornate pillars and a row of baroque embellishments along the roof-line. The ceilings were finished with cornicing, some floors were tiled and others made with polished wood. The day the craftsmen had packed up their tools, with the plaster only just dry on the moulded caryatids that decorated the upper windows, was its moment of greatest glory and grandeur. From that day on, the house had seen a long and steady journey to decay.

  The family’s lack of resources for making any repairs meant that cracked stonework and rotten floorboards proved a constant danger to them all. The once-prosperous family was now a struggling one. Seventy years earlier, Themis’ maternal ancestors had been part of the growing merchant class, but unwise investments meant that only the house remained. Many of the contents, including paintings and silver, had been sold off over time and only a few pieces of antique French furniture and some jewellery were spared.

  Themis knew no different and imagined that all families lived in a state of warfare with a crumbling building. Cracked windows let in the dust, flaking plaster sometimes fell from the ceiling in chunks and roof tiles were sent crashing to the pavement in high winds. During winter and spring, she was kept awake by the steady ting ting ting of raindrops landing in one of a dozen buckets. It made an almost musical sound and the ever-growing number of receptacles catching the water was a measure of the building’s steady progress towards dereliction.

  Another house in the street was already boarded up. In reality, it was fitter for human habitation than the mouldy building lived in by the Koralis family, who cohabited with a growing population of bacteria that even now were beginning to form spores. The ground floor was decayed, with a smell of rot rising through the floor and seeping into the walls.

  The children had free run of their home, oblivious to the dangers presented by its state of decay, filling it with noise and boisterous play. Though Themis was too small to join in, she sat at the foot of the stairs and watched as her siblings ran up and down the big central staircase and slid down the smooth wooden banister rail. Three of the posts had split, leaving a hazardous gap with a sheer drop to one side.

  She watched with great delight as Thanasis, Panos and Margarita flew towards her. Their mother rarely kept watch and only appeared when one of her children lost control and landed on the hard, stone-tiled floor. She responded quickly to a howl of pain and always came to make sure that the injury was no more serious than a bruise to the head, cradling the injured child for a moment but returning to her chores the moment the sobs subsided. At the foot of the stairs lay a rug still spotted with blood from Thanasis’ most recent accident. Eleftheria had done her best to scrub it clean and soon the marks would blend into the mostly faded browns and reds of the weave.

  Themis ignored a ban on going under the dining table. She loved this secret place where she could hide beneath the solid mahogany and the drapes of a heavy, embroidered cloth and listen to the muffled sounds of what was happening above her. It was a place of both safety and danger; in truth, nowhere in this house was without hidden peril. A section of floorboard beneath the table had rotted away, leaving a hole big enough for a small foot to slip through. When she grew another few centimetres, her leg would appear in the room below. ‘And then you will fall through,’ said her mother. ‘And die.’

  For Themis, her mother’s voice was associated with instructions and warnings.

  Pavlos Koralis made an occasional appearance when the merchant ship he captained docked in Piraeus. He was a giant of a man and could easily pick up both his daughters at once. Themis could never understand why Margarita was even meaner to her than usual when their father was at home, not knowing that the older child had felt displaced the moment she arrived. She hated sharing anything, least of all paternal affection. When he returned from one of his journeys to a far-off place, Pavlos’ bag was full of strange and exotic gifts for them all. From China there were tiny embroidered slippers, a knife each for the boys and an uncut gem for his wife (fake or real, she never knew). And from India he brought carved elephants, incense sticks and pieces of silk. These were the ‘artefacts’ that added occasional glimpses of colour to the house in place of the more valuable but dour family heirlooms that had been sold to buy shoes.

  When Pavlos was on leave, the anarchy in the house increased. Eleftheria Koralis tried to keep on top of domestic demands but her husband’s presence added to her duties, not just in the bedroom, but with meals and laundry. Themis associated her father’s visits with her mother being more harassed than normal and a dirtier than usual floor.

  During these days, Themis spent as much time as she could in her favourite hiding place. When her father was in town, there were visitors to the house and when they ate there was constant banging on the wooden roof above her, as they thumped their hands on the table. From an early age she was familiar with certain words and names, always spoken in a raised voice and rarely without cries of outrage: ‘Venizelos!’, ‘George!’, ‘The King’, ‘Turks!’, ‘Jews!’

  By the age of three, she knew the word ‘catastrophe’. Why had it happened? Who had been responsible? Up until the decade’s end and for many years beyond, there were arguments around every table in the land over who had been at fault for the events that led up to the destruction of Smyrna, the most
beautiful city in Asia Minor, in 1922. The deaths of so many Greeks would never be forgotten, nor would the million refugees whose arrival had changed the fabric of society.

  Themis grew up with the impression that even those who socialised together, such as Pavlos Koralis and his friends, often disagreed. The finale for any altercation, however, was always the clinking of glasses. They tipped back one measure of firewater after another, banging the glasses down hard enough to dent the table. The clear liquid fuelled their passions and their anger before a rowdy song began.

  Eventually Themis would be pulled out from under the table by her mother even if she had fallen asleep across her father’s boots.

  From her hiding place, Themis also overheard muted conversations between her parents and sometimes, when her father was away, between her mother and paternal grandmother, who was a regular, if not always welcome, visitor to the house. Most of these seemed to relate to the dilapidated mansion and how long they might be able to live there. One day, when her grandmother came, she heard something that made an even bigger impression.

  ‘They can’t live in this shipwreck of a house any longer.’

  Her grandmother sounded indignant but the child loved the idea of the house being like a boat. On stormy days, with the wind whistling through cracked windows, it creaked and swayed as if they were out at sea.

  Her mother’s response was not what she had imagined.

  ‘You have no shame,’ she hissed. ‘This is our home. Please go. Please leave, now.’

  Her mother’s voice was hoarse with all the effort it took simultaneously to whisper and project her anger.

  ‘I worry so much for them,’ continued Kyría Koralis. ‘I just think they should live somewhere less . . .’

  Eleftheria did not let her continue.

  ‘Don’t you dare say this in front of the children!’

  The older woman’s campaign to ‘save’ her grandchildren was often conducted more subtly. Themis heard far more than she should and soon worked out the cunning ways of adults.

  ‘I am worried about your wife,’ the grandmother said to Pavlos when he was home from sea. ‘She works so very hard. Why don’t you move somewhere modest but decent?’

  It was true that such a house needed two maids to keep it clean, and they could not afford even one.

  Her mother-in-law’s interfering comments were rarely addressed directly to Eleftheria herself, so in turn she answered through her husband.

  ‘This is our home,’ Eleftheria said to Pavlos. ‘Whatever your mother thinks, I can manage.’

  It was obvious even to Pavlos that his mother was jealous of a wife who had brought such an impressive property to the marriage and he was not surprised that there was mutual dislike. When he and his friends talked of it, they agreed that it was normal for a woman to resent her daughter-in-law, and for a wife to dislike her petherá. Eleftheria believed that her mother-in-law’s possessive attitude to her only son and proprietorial attitude towards their children undermined her own role, while Kyría Koralis believed these were natural expressions of love and a mother and grandmother’s rightful role.

  Themis, on the other hand, looked forward to her grandmother’s appearances because she always brought something fresh and sweet – usually a creamy pie or cake. Her mother never made such things and the children’s exclamations of delight added to Eleftheria’s sense of inadequacy and made her resent her cheerful, generous-hipped petherá all the more. Kyría Koralis was almost sixty but did not have a single grey hair.

  Like his mother’s, Pavlos Koralis’ visits were always a surprise. This was exciting when he arrived but when he left, also without notice, the children felt bereft. Themis would wake in the bed she shared with her sister and simply know, without being told, that he had gone. The booming voice no longer filled the house and the lofty, crumbling spaces felt empty. Life immediately returned to its old normality: constant squabbling among the children; play-fighting between Thanasis and Panos, which always ended with someone hurt or something broken; mild cruelty perpetrated by Margarita; the grandmother coming by for an hour, not to help in any way but just to watch her daughter-in-law as she ironed, cooked, cleaned and hung out washing, never failing to comment on how raw her hands were from scrubbing out stains from clothes and marks on the floor.

  With Eleftheria constantly busy, Themis was often left alone to amuse herself. The child had never known a single hour in her life when her mother was not involved in a pressing task that would need repeating the following day.

  One winter’s morning, when her mother had left in a hurry for her daily visit to the market, and Themis was under the table (her place of comfort now that she was old enough to know what loneliness was), the four-year-old child heard a bang, like the slamming of the heavy front door. It must be her mother back sooner than usual from her errands.

  In fact, amongst all the cracks in the plaster, disguised among the many lines that criss-crossed the flaking paint, were fissures that went from inside to out, from top to bottom. A series of mild seismic movements over the past few decades (and an indiscernible one that day) had been enough not only to crack walls but also to create instability in the foundations.

  When Themis emerged from beneath the table, where it was always dark, she faced a brighter than usual light. Shutters usually kept the room in a state of twilight but now there were none. Nor were there windows or walls. There was nothing to stop the light coming in. She walked to the edge of the room and looked out. She could see the whole of the street, to left and right, trees, a far-off tram, people walking in the distance. She looked down into what seemed like an abyss.

  People had begun to gather on the pavement beneath her and were looking up, pointing at the little girl in a pale pink dress, who stood as if in a picture frame. Themis looked down and waved at them cheerfully, moving closer towards the edge of the precipice to try to hear what they were calling to her.

  As her mother came hurrying down the street, moving as fast as her burdens would allow her, she noticed the crowd gathered outside her home. Then she saw the unfamiliar sight of a building, opened up like a cupboard, with the small figure of her daughter seated, her legs dangling over the edge.

  The floor was unsupported by anything beneath. It was floating.

  Eleftheria Koralis dropped her shopping and ran. People moved out of the way to let her pass.

  ‘Themis! Agápi mou! Darling!’

  These were unfamiliar words from her mother.

  ‘Mána!’ she called back. ‘Koíta! Look!’

  On the street below, a bigger crowd was gathering. It was extraordinary how rapidly people had appeared from their homes.

  Even for a grown man, the jump from the first floor might have been challenging, but for a small child the fall into a pile of twisted metal and sections of broken stonework and jagged plaster could prove fatal.

  ‘Stay . . .’ said Eleftheria, holding the flat of her palm towards her daughter and attempting to sound calm. ‘Just stay still . . . and we will get you down.’

  Carefully she picked her way over some fallen masonry, then turned to the people around her, appealing with her eyes for their help. A man had appeared with a blanket and three other men were already volunteering to hold it out so that Themis could jump. They were scrambling over the wreckage of the façade to get themselves into position. There was another audible crack as one of the side walls fell inwards. With a squeal, mimicking the way in which her siblings sometimes launched themselves off the stairs for a dare, Themis jumped. She landed lightly on her feet, in the middle of the rough wool bedspread, and before she knew what was happening found herself bundled up into a ball and tossed to the waiting crowd as the men fell over themselves to jump clear of the falling masonry.

  Once at a safe distance, she was quickly unwrapped from the folds and handed to her mother. Eleftheria cuddled her for a few moments and then everything went still, as the whole house began to crumble. Every wall had supported another and
now that the structure had given way the entire edifice collapsed, not piece by piece but in one swift, almost graceful, movement, sending a cloud of dust over the spectators, who now backed away, shielding their eyes from the grit.

  At this moment, Thanasis, Panos and Margarita turned the corner into Antigonis Street. They were puzzled by the gathering ahead of them but could not see above all the heads to find out what was holding their attention.

  Panos tugged on the sleeve of a man standing in front of them. He had to be persistent.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled above the general commotion. ‘What’s happened?’

  The man spun round.

  ‘A house. It fell down. Right in front of us. It just collapsed.’

  The children had all heard their grandmother telling their father on numerous occasions that the house was ‘going to fall down around their heads’ and had spent their lives dodging the drips and being woken by chunks of ceiling landing on their beds. Their yiayiá had been right.

  ‘Our mother,’ said Margarita tearfully. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘And the little one,’ added Panos. Even though she was four, Themis was still known as this by her siblings. ‘I mikrí? The little one?’

  ‘We’ll find them,’ said Thanasis firmly, aware of himself as the big brother.

  Nothing more could happen now. The crowd was beginning to disperse and the view was clearer for the children. The three of them stood, eyes wide, staring at the irregular pile of shattered furniture and possessions, the contents of three floors now sitting on the ground. They all noticed individual objects sticking out from the rubble – some of the gifts from their father, splashes of colour visible even in the chaos, Margarita’s favourite doll, torn books, a kitchen cabinet lying on its side spewing out pots and pans.

  One of the neighbours had spotted the children clinging to each other with distress and came over. All three were suppressing quiet sobs.