The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘I didn’t have to come from somewhere. I was already here.’

  ‘So this is where you live. In Smyrna?’

  ‘Yes.’ Almost impossibly, Leonidas found himself smiling. Her childlike detachment from her situation seemed almost mystical. His own despair seemed to lift.

  Katerina was weightless in his arms. As light as a fairy, he mused. He had only ever lifted one other child, his nephew, Dimitri, and that was more than a year ago. Even then, Dimitri had been heavier than this little person. In spite of the rank odour of sweat and smoke around him, he could smell that the child who wrapped her arms so tightly round his neck gave off an aroma of clean linen and fresh flowers.

  The dense crowd responded to his authoritative voice and what remained of his soldier’s uniform, and parted to let them through. He could feel the crunch of broken glass and had to avoid tripping on all the abandoned domestic objects underfoot. A small child, especially a barefooted child, as so many were, would not have survived for a minute all alone in this chaos.

  Leonidas spoke to a woman who seemed in charge of the boats and explained that the child was injured. Soon she was being helped into a boat.

  ‘Look after my sleeve!’ he shouted cheerily. ‘I’ll need it back!’

  ‘I promise!’ the little girl called out.

  Hers was the first smile he had seen in a year. In all his time in active service, he had rarely seen such stoicism.

  Leonidas waved until she was a speck on the horizon. Then he headed back to the flaming ruins of the city.

  Chapter Six

  AS EACH STROKE of the oars took them closer to the big ship anchored out in the bay, Katerina grew excited at the thought of seeing her mother. When they drew up alongside, she grasped the metal steps and began to climb. Her arm was throbbing and when strange hands reached down towards her and lifted her onto the deck she winced with pain as one of them touched her arm. A well-meaning woman patted her on the head, gave her a piece of bread and a cup of water and settled her onto a bench. The ship was crammed full of women and children. Husbands and fathers were away in the army and thousands of them had died in recent months. Almost all of these women were widows.

  ‘Are you alone?’ enquired a woman who seemed to be in charge.

  ‘My mother’s here,’ Katerina replied. ‘But I don’t know where.’

  ‘Shall we go for a walk then, and see if we can find her?’

  She took Katerina’s hand and together they walked the length and breadth of the ship. Many people were in great distress. Some were wounded, others rocked back and forth, traumatised by the events of the past twenty-four hours.

  Katerina’s grip on the woman’s hand tightened.

  ‘Can you tell me what she looks like?’ the woman asked. ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘She had on a dress like mine,’ answered Katerina with certainty. ‘When she makes a dress for herself she always makes one for me that’s the same.’

  ‘It’s a very pretty dress, then!’ she said smiling. Although the little girl’s dress was grubby, she could see it had once been beautiful. It was covered with embroidered daisies and edged with lace but now, rather incongruously, one of the sleeves appeared to have been made out of a different fabric.

  ‘But what have you done to your arm?’

  ‘It caught fire,’ answered Katerina.

  ‘Oh dear! Well, as soon as we’ve found your mother, we’ll have it looked at,’ continued the woman with a concerned voice. ‘Now, can you see her on deck? If not, I’m sure she will be inside.’

  ‘She’s with a baby,’ Katerina said chattily, ‘who’s only a few months old.’

  It was beginning to dawn on the woman that this search might be fruitless, so she tried to distract Katerina with conversation, asking her questions about her sibling, whether it was a boy or a girl, her name and so on. After a twenty-minute search, it was becoming obvious to the woman that the mother was not going to be found. She was loath to crush the child’s cheerful spirit, but sooner or later she would have to tell her that they had run out of possibilities. Her mother was not on this boat.

  ‘I am sure we will find her, but for a little while we’ll have to ask someone else to look after you . . .’

  Another rowing boat had arrived to offload its human cargo onto the ship. There was precious little space left and the woman who was helping to arrange the evacuation looked over anxiously.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she said to a woman who was sitting between two children, on a huge bundle that now contained everything they owned. ‘Would you mind keeping an eye on this little one for a moment?’

  The mother held out her hands towards Katerina.

  ‘Of course, come and sit with us,’ she said kindly. ‘Move up, Maria.’

  Katerina heard a slightly strange accent, but it did not make the woman too hard to understand. One of the two children snuggled closer to her mother to make space for Katerina.

  ‘Make yourself nice and comfy,’ said the mother. ‘I’m Kyria Eugenia and these are my daughters, Maria and Sofia.’

  It was dusk. The engines began to throb and the heavy clank of the anchor being pulled up alerted everyone to the ship’s imminent departure. Katerina’s head lolled onto Maria’s shoulder and with the motion of the ship the three little girls were soon asleep. They were among the last of the two hundred thousand people evacuated from Smyrna in those terrifying few days.

  By sunrise, the ship had docked.

  The night before, Katerina had been so tired that she had not taken in that the two girls she was now travelling with were identical twins. She looked from one to another and rubbed her eyes, wondering if they were playing tricks on her. Both of them giggled. They were well accustomed to such a reaction and played on their uncanny similarity.

  ‘Who is who?’ asked Sofia.

  ‘You’re Maria!’ answered Katerina.

  ‘Wrong!’ cried Sofia with delight. ‘Now hide your eyes!’

  Katerina did what she was told and when Sofia shouted ‘Ready!’ she opened them.

  ‘What’s my name?’ asked Sofia.

  ‘Maria!’

  ‘Wrong again!’

  She had never seen such similitude. To the millimetre their hair was cut the same length and their red dresses were indistinguishable from each other. Even the freckles on their noses matched. It was an hour or so before they were all allowed to disembark, and during that time they played lots of games with Katerina, all based on their similarity. By the time they were allowed onto land, they were firm friends. The three of them followed Eugenia down the gangplank, holding hands like paper dolls.

  A soldier threw Eugenia’s bundle into a waiting truck and they climbed in after it.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Katerina heard Kyria Eugenia ask, but the soldier’s response was inaudible. They were somewhere she did not recognise and, for the first time since their parting, the certainty that her mother was close by left her. It already seemed a very long time since she had seen her. Was it a day? A week? A month? She sank back against some crates, pulled her knees in towards herself and cried quietly so that no one would notice. She knew this was the best way.

  Not so long ago, her mother had sat her down and said, ‘You must be brave, my little one.’

  She remembered that her mother had been weeping herself at the time, so Katerina felt it was for her sake that she must refrain from crying too.

  ‘Your father won’t be coming back from the war. He was very courageous and died saving someone else.’

  Katerina had felt proud of her father and, even at her young age, she knew how to bury her sadness and to make sure that it did not make anyone else feel unhappy too.

  When they reached the camp where tens of thousands of others had already settled, her confidence returned and she began to ask questions of Kyria Eugenia.

  ‘Where have they brought us? Why are we here? Are we going to see my mother?’

  ‘Well, Katerina,’ she said, in her gentlest voice, �
��we’re on an island called Mytilini now. But I am sure they will try to find—’

  ‘But my mother wanted to go to Athens!’ the little girl said with alarm. ‘Is it far away?’

  ‘It’s not such a big distance from here,’ Eugenia replied reassuringly, squeezing her hand.

  There was no point in telling the child the truth. Those who had been in charge of organising the evacuation from Smyrna were interested only in shifting the huge number of people to safety. Getting them away from the flames and the vengeful Turks had been their priority, not keeping records of who went where and with whom. There were a million or more people on the move and the chances of tracing Katerina’s mother were virtually non-existent.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll find her later on, my sweetness.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ whined Sofia, passing a queue for soup. ‘Can’t we have something to eat?’

  ‘Let’s find somewhere to sleep first and then we’ll get something,’ answered her mother. She could see from the sheer volume of humanity milling around that only a percentage of the refugees would be sleeping under canvas that night. There was not enough accommodation for them all.

  For several hours they waited patiently for a tent to be allocated to them, and all the while Katerina’s eyes darted left and right, eagerly hoping for a glimpse of her mother. No one told her that Mytilini was nearly two hundred and fifty kilometres from Athens.

  Once in their tent, Sofia continued to whine. Though they looked the same, Katerina was already noticing that the twins were very different in other ways.

  While they were still on the boat, Sofia had proudly told her that she had ‘come out first’. Maria had protested that it was only by a matter of minutes, but clearly her earlier emergence into the world had given Sofia the confidence that made her the leader of the two. Her twin, Maria, was her reflection. Like an echo she often repeated Sofia’s views rather than having her own and she was certainly the gentler of the two.

  Eventually, the exhausted trio of children lay down on a straw mattress and sank into a deep slumber, their hunger forgotten.

  Eugenia stood outside and looked up and down the row of tents. Most of these refugees had lost every possession they owned, as well as members of their family. Many of them were in a trance-like state, as though sleepwalking, their lined faces without expression. When she saw one of the occupants emerging from the adjacent tent, she greeted her. Living less than a metre from each other, with nothing more than thin canvas to divide them, this woman was now her close neighbour but she gave not even the slightest acknowledgement that Eugenia was there.

  Almost immediately, Eugenia understood why. Wrapped within the folds of her voluminous dress, typical of the style worn by the more rural Pontic Greeks, the woman held a sick child. Eugenia noticed that she was weeping, but the child itself was limp and silent.

  The woman drew her headscarf across her face and hastened away without meeting Eugenia’s eye. Dysentery. There had been rumours in the accommodation queue that it was wiping out hundreds of people every day and a knot of fear tightened in Eugenia’s stomach. She hoped they would be out of this place soon.

  The girls woke up to a feast of bread, tomatoes and milk. It was more than a day since they had eaten. The twins had quickly accepted that Katerina was part of yet another change in their lives. In the past few months, everything had altered so dramatically that having an additional person with them seemed a small detail.

  As soon as they had eaten, Eugenia took Katerina to the first aid-post. The nurse carefully removed the ‘bandage’ that had been protecting her arm. Beneath it, the flesh was raw from shoulder to elbow.

  ‘We’d better get this cleaned up and dressed straightaway,’ she said, with no attempt to conceal her surprise at the extent of the wound. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Yes, but I try not to think about it,’ answered the little girl.

  Katerina winced as the nurse applied ointment, but within moments, the stinging flesh was hidden away beneath a gleaming bandage and the little girl looked down proudly at the flawlessly bound arm.

  ‘Bring her back to see me in four days’ time,’ the nurse told Eugenia. ‘I want to make sure it’s still clean. There are enough bacteria around here to wipe out the whole lot of us in the blink of an eye . . .’

  Eugenia took Katerina’s hand and led her quickly out of the tent. She was angry with the nurse for saying such things in front of a child.

  The two of them walked along the narrow ‘streets’ of the refugee camp, working their way towards the row where the twins awaited their return. Suddenly Katerina remembered something. The sleeve.

  ‘Kyria Eugenia! We’ve got to go back! Please! I left something there.’

  The anguish in the child’s voice gave her no option. Within minutes, pulling on Eugenia’s hand, Katerina had dragged her back to the medical tent. The little girl went straight up to the nurse, who was attending an injured woman.

  ‘Do you still have my old bandage?’

  The nurse paused in her work and gave the child a withering look.

  Katerina looked around. The floor had been swept and she spotted a pile of debris by the tent flap.

  ‘It’s there!’ she said triumphantly, running over to pick it up.

  ‘But, Katerina, it’s filthy. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it behind?’ pleaded Eugenia, mindful of what the nurse had said about the virulent bacteria rampaging through the camp.

  ‘But I promised . . .’ She held on to it tightly.

  Eugenia knew how stubborn little girls could be and she could see the determination on Katerina’s face.

  ‘Very well, but we will have to give it a good wash as soon as we can.’

  Before they left the tent, Eugenia noted the look of disgust on the nurse’s face. There seemed no harm in keeping a child happy in these circumstances, she mused to herself. Katerina’s contented expression showed how much it meant to her to have retrieved the rag.

  ‘I promised to give it back to the soldier,’ she explained. ‘It’s still got one of his buttons.’

  Eugenia took a closer look and sure enough there was a button still attached to it. It was tarnished, but there it was, still hanging by a thread.

  Katerina put it away in her pocket and they returned to their tent to find the twins.

  The task of tracking down her mother still preoccupied Katerina, and she and Eugenia spent many hours walking up and down rows of makeshift tents to see if they could find her. Many of the families they met were Pontic Greeks, like Eugenia and her daughters – people who had lived near the Black Sea – and Eugenia even found some from her village near Trebizond. In the one-thousand-kilometre flight from their homes to Smyrna, families and friends had become separated and she was overjoyed to re-establish contact with some people she knew.

  Katerina did not see one familiar face from Smyrna and the camp organisers confirmed to Eugenia that no one named Zenia Sarafoglou had registered with them.

  Silently, Eugenia accepted that she might need to keep Katerina with her. All around there were similar situations and depleted families were being formed into new shapes by loss and adoption. Maria and Sofia were beginning to regard the newcomer as a permanent sister. Like many nine-year-old girls, they had strong maternal instincts. Until now, they had shared a single doll between them, but now they had a bigger than life-size version. Katerina basked in their attention and even allowed them to rebandage her arm whenever it was necessary. It was beginning to heal, but the arm would be badly scarred.

  The mild October weather encouraged them to play outside for most of the day, and with plenty of children all around, the three girls made new friends. But as weeks turned into months, and the temperatures dropped, they retreated more and more into their tents. Among the possessions she had carried with her across the plains of Asia Minor, Eugenia had brought some of her embroidery silks and some wool left over from a rug she had been weaving. Under her guidance, the girls began to fill their days making p
atchwork blankets from scraps of material they found in the camp. Sometimes there was a delivery of old clothes from a philanthropic organisation in America and they would be given something ‘new’ to wear, which could be embellished with colourful stitching, appliqué and plenty of imagination. On one particular day, in a moment of boredom, Maria had pushed her needle through the canvas of the tent-flap and soon they had covered their ‘door’ with stitches, ‘writing’ their names in red, green and blue and decorating them with flowers and leaves.

  For a final flourish, Eugenia traced the words ‘Spiti mou, spitaki mou’ in large stitches. This was what the tent had become: ‘Home Sweet Home’.

  For the children at least, the traumatic departure from their homes began to fade in their memories and dreams became sweet once more.

  Even though the efforts of the adults to keep the children happy were largely successful, they were all too aware of the ever-deteriorating conditions of the camp and were growing weary of the stultifying inactivity.

  Eugenia knew that their old life in Asia Minor could never be recovered, but she could not begin to contemplate the thought of a permanent life in Mytilini’s unfriendly landscape. They were playing a waiting game. Many had died of disease in the camp and there was always the possibility that it would be their turn next. What an irony, thought Eugenia, to have survived such hardships to reach Smyrna and then to die here.

  There was enough food but winter was beginning to bite, with plummeting temperatures and torrential rainfall.

  Rumours began to reach them that diplomatic efforts were being made to resolve their situation. That at least was a comfort. Even if time had no real meaning for the children, most adults felt the relentless passage of the days and wondered how much of their lives were to be squandered in this place.

  One day they heard the welcome news that they were all to be taken to the mainland. Though the numbers were massively imbalanced, there was to be an official exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.