The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

  I need you to know the truth of my situation, Kyria Karayanidis. Nothing would make me happier than to see Katerina again, but I believe she may have a better future staying in Thessaloniki with you than coming to Athens. I know times are difficult but would you care for her a while longer?

  When Katerina came home, her own letter was waiting on the table and she picked it up with great excitement.

  ‘Will you read it to me?’ she cried. ‘I can’t read her funny writing.’

  ‘Of course, sweetheart,’ said Eugenia. ‘Let’s sit down.’

  She took a deep breath and began.

  ‘My darling daughter, I was so pleased to receive all your letters. Your life sounds so happy and contented and Thessaloniki must be a wonderful city. Life in Athens is not as easy. We have very little space and it is a struggle to get enough food to feed us all.’

  Eugenia paused. She knew what must surely follow.

  ‘Much as I yearn to see you, I want you to think twice about coming to live with us. Consider what you have in your life now and if what it contains is good, with good people, perhaps that is what you should hold on to. The things you know are sometimes much better than the things you don’t know.’

  Eugenia looked up and saw the child’s eyes were full of tears. She also noticed that Katerina was inadvertently stroking her scarred arm, an action that had become automatic whenever she was anxious or upset. Eugenia could feel the writer’s anguish and knew what it was she was trying to say to her child. She pitied them both equally. Katerina was too young for such a choice, but there it was, in black and white, written on the letter that now lay before her.

  Even before Eugenia had finished reading, Katerina had realised something herself. She no longer knew which of these two women was really her mother: the woman who had been reading to her or the woman who had been writing to her. She kept this thought inside, but the desire to get to Athens, which she had felt so deeply and for so long, had begun to melt away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  FOR A WHILE, sadness was Katerina’s constant companion. It was there waiting for her each morning when she woke and stayed with her all day as she went to and from school and played with her friends. Sometimes it followed her into her dreams and she woke with her face in a pool of tears. She had learned to be brave when she was small, though, and she was determined to shrug off this unwanted friend. Eugenia kept a careful eye on her and after many weeks saw her slowly rediscover her smile.

  At around the same time as losing the dream of seeing her mother, she had lost one of her closest companions. Irini Street did not seem the same without Dimitri. Both he and his mother, for different reasons, had not kept their promise to visit.

  Dimitri was missing his friends too. His new school took him in a new direction beyond the White Tower and towards the huge mansions on Olga Vasilisis Street. Many had turrets and domes and double-sweeping staircases that presented a choice on how to reach the front door. They had been commissioned by the affluent merchants who wanted to advertise their success, if not their good taste, and made even the Komninos house look modest.

  On Sundays, Katerina, Elias, Isaac and the twins would stroll down to the sea, and Dimitri would look out of the huge drawing room windows on the first floor of his house and see them.

  ‘Can I go out for a while?’ he would ask his mother.

  ‘As long as you are home for dinner,’ she would answer. ‘Your father is coming back at eight.’

  Her husband would often be out during the day at the warehouses or his office. She knew Konstantinos would disapprove, but Olga was happy for Dimitri to take a break from his studying. As well as a dozen other academic subjects, he was learning French, German and English, and his father had great ambitions for his fluency, as long as he worked hard enough.

  ‘If we are going to take our business forward, Dimitri, those are the languages you have to learn. We are looking towards Europe and America now. Buying from the East and selling to the West. This is where we will make our fortunes.’

  Olga sometimes wondered what he meant by that. How much more of a fortune could he possibly want?

  In their first days back in the refurbished home, Olga could see how much Dimitri missed the company of his old friends and urged him to see them again. Even if her growing fears were keeping Olga away from Irini Street, she did not want her son to lose touch with his old playmates.

  One day he spotted them on the promenade and ran out to find them. Olga watched the group from the balcony.

  Looking down at the crowd moving in both directions along the esplanade, she had an overpowering sense of her own solitude. Part of her yearned to be with them. The sight of her son with his friends and a thousand other people milling about in the weekend sunshine, enjoying the intoxicating combination of warmth, breeze and light, was a familiar one. Her sense of being shut, not merely within the walls of the house but inside her own skin, created an invisible barrier that kept them apart.

  She was totally unable to leave the house nowadays. In the summer she found the heat oppressive and in the winter the dampness made her bones ache. These were not the only excuses, though. The four walls of her magnificent house were like a cage, within which she was safe. Food was brought to her, clothes were sewn for her, the hairdresser attended to her hair at home and now her son came and went without need for guidance or help. Since returning from Irini Street, the outside world had become a place of irrational fear and a reluctance to leave her home had turned to full-scale terror for Olga.

  Konstantinos Komninos was unaffected by his wife’s silent phobia. He often brought significant clients to the house for dinner, and on these occasions Olga was always impeccable, both in appearance and mood. In winter, she wore a tailored dress that showed off the quality of the heavier luxury fabrics in which Komninos specialised, and in the summer, she changed to lighter ones. Sometimes, if the client was very important, a tailor would be commissioned to make something bespoke for the occasion. For example, when a French couturier visited, Olga greeted him in an outfit of red, white and blue. Dimitri even appeared that night to recite a French poem.

  Olga stopped watching when the children disappeared from sight. She imagined them eating sweet trigona pastries with their fingers and sipping lemonade purchased from the street vendor, just as she had done when she was a child. She closed the shutters and retreated inside the darkened room to rest. In due course, Dimitri would return, his face flushed with sunshine and laughter.

  Isaac always made sure that the girls were back in good time too. He took responsibility for them all and Eugenia was happy to know that the strong capable boy would make sure they were safe. Sofia and Maria were fourteen now and almost of the age where they should not be out on their own, unaccompanied.

  The twins would soon be leaving school and both of them had already declared that they did not want to follow in their mother’s footsteps and become weavers. They wanted to be outside. To their mother’s dismay the twins announced to Eugenia that they wanted to grade tobacco leaves. An agriculturalist had been to the school to start signing up pupils and Sofia and Maria were on his list of recruits.

  ‘But why don’t you want to learn a skill?’ their mother appealed. ‘If you start learning something now, you will be an expert in it before you are twenty. Don’t you want that?’

  ‘We don’t want to be sitting inside a dark house for the rest of our lives,’ answered Sofia.

  ‘And we would be with lots of other people,’ said Maria.

  ‘And we would get paid by the amount we process.’

  ‘But that’s the same with weaving,’ said Eugenia. ‘I get paid for every rug I finish.’

  ‘But it takes you months to make a rug!’

  ‘That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t get paid more each month than the girls who are paid every week for their tobacco sorting!’

  It seemed that someone had already done a good job of persuading the girls that their future lay in the enormo
us tobacco trade that thrived in northern Greece.

  Katerina cowered in the corner. She was still too young to have been targeted by the farmers who had been allowed access into the school, and in any case she would not have been open to their propaganda. Whenever this argument was brewing, she slipped away next door.

  Roza Moreno loved it when Katerina appeared in her house. She was always busy, whatever the time or day, but she happily chatted while she worked. There was generally a close-packed rack of jackets that she had finished that day, their immaculate buttonholes completed and buttons sewn on (as many as a dozen if it was double-breasted and had small buttons down each cuff ). Finally she had stitched a label onto the satin lining: ‘MORENO & SONS, Master Tailors of Thessaloniki’.

  ‘Every time I finish a garment and read those words,’ she told Katerina, ‘I feel proud.’

  The original Moreno had been Saul’s great-grandfather, and the skill had now been passed down through three generations. With their two sons, there would be a fourth.

  Much of Roza Moreno’s day was spent working with suiting fabrics: wools and tweeds in the winter, and sometimes linen in the summer. More than a thousand times, Katerina had watched her neatly and rhythmically stitching a buttonhole. It mesmerised her to see a human being working like a machine, but this was not really why she came.

  As well as the finishing touches on suits, Roza specialised in the fine crochet work and embroidery that people wanted for their trousseaux. She had a high reputation among the very wealthy Europeans for this, and to teach a little girl, with the finest fingers she had ever seen, was a joy. She taught Katerina everything, from the basic requirements to keep the skin on the hands smooth so that nothing would catch, to the importance of threading silk correctly so that it ran along the weft of the fabric. The minutiae of the craft were crucial and, once learned, never forgotten.

  Very soon, when Katerina copied some of her stitches, Roza could not tell the difference between those of the child and her own. Kyria Moreno was a virtuoso, but Katerina, her pupil, was a prodigy.

  On the evening when the row over the tobacco factories was in full swing, Kyria Moreno was, as ever, delighted to see her. It meant she could put the man’s jacket to one side and indulge her real passion.

  ‘Hello, Katerina!’ she said. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Very well, thank you, Kyria Moreno. And how is Kyria Moreno today?’

  She nodded her head in the direction of the corner where Kyria Moreno’s mother-in-law always sat. The elder Kyria Moreno was very silent these days and most of the time appeared unaware of her surroundings. She was like a waxwork, dressed in the finery of traditional Sephardic dress, to be admired like a work of art.

  ‘We’re very well, aren’t we, Kyria Moreno?’

  Roza Moreno was in the habit of speaking to her mother-in-law as well as speaking for her, so a strange monologue would often go on in front of the apparently comatose old lady.

  ‘Shall we get the box down, then?’

  Katerina pulled a chair over towards a high shelf and climbed up to get a wooden box. It seemed almost as big as she was, but she managed to slide it off the shelf and pass it down to Kyria Moreno, who put it in the centre of the table.

  Katerina ran her hand over the lid, enjoying the patina of smoothness, and traced with her finger the delicate image of the pomegranate, which had been inlaid into its surface. The box was oval, lined with pale pink silk and the lid itself was padded. The interior space was divided into tidy compartments, within which were spools of white cotton for lace, lengths of fine gauze edging, skeins of silk in pastel colours, tiny spools smaller than a little finger and, in the padding of the lid itself, needles were ranged in size order.

  From a smaller box, Roza Moreno got out some silk lingerie, which was being kept pristine betwen layers of tissue. It was for the daughter of a wealthy client and to be worn on her wedding day. There was to be no expense spared on either the gown, which was being produced in the workshop, nor on the garments that were to be worn beneath it.

  They both sat down at the table, next to each other so that Katerina could follow Roza’s hands and copy.

  ‘Can you pass them to me?’

  When Katerina picked up the weightless silk culottes they ran like cool water through her fingers.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said giggling, as they landed on the linen table cloth. ‘It’s as though they aren’t really there!’

  ‘This is the flimsiest fabric that you can actually sew,’ said Kyria Moreno. ‘Any finer and there’s not a needle in the world that’s small enough.’

  Katerina had her own scrap of silk crêpe de Chine to work on. She had already embroidered the edging and was now starting work on some lettering. Her plan was to complete a whole name in the same scripted style that her teacher was using for the underclothes. It took huge skill and concentration to place the point of the needle correctly so that it did not snag the fabric, but the child was determined and her skill seemed innate.

  ‘Can you thread a number eight for me?’

  A number 8 was very fine and would smoothly slip through fabric without leaving a mark. First of all, Kyria Moreno split the silk into two ‘filos’ and further subdivided one of those so that they would be sewing with something finer than human hair. She then relied on Katerina’s eagle-sharp eyesight to thread the silk. She made no knot in the thread as the ends would be hidden invisibly within the fabric.

  Then they both began to sew. The art was to ‘inscribe’ the name in stitches, and to make it look as though it was spontaneously written like a signature, a style which made the garment completely personal for the wearer.

  They worked for an hour or more, with the muffled sound of the continuing argument coming through the wall. Roza hummed as she sewed, very quietly and under her breath, every so often looking down to her left where Katerina was studiously working her way along the name, each stitch taking her closer to the flower with which she was going to finish it off.

  ‘That’s perfect, glyki mou, flawless, sweetheart,’ Roza said. ‘Don’t you think you should be going home soon, though?’

  ‘I want to finish this first,’ Katerina said without a second’s hesitation. ‘And anyway, Kyria Eugenia will call me when it’s time.’

  ‘I should stop now, my eyes are so tired, but I’ll keep you company! When Saul comes in, I’ll stop.’

  Kyria Moreno had finished the name in pale pink on the culottes and now folded them carefully and replaced them in the box, which she then tied up with ribbon. They would not come out until the wedding day.

  Then she picked up the sewing that she did purely for her own pleasure. It was a piece of embroidery that was both finished and unfinished, a work in progress that she might be adding to for the rest of her life: an embroidered quilt that was already in use on her bed with appliquéd birds, fruit, flowers and butterflies. She would always find a space to add another tiny bunch of grapes, a sprig of jasmine or, as she was doing today, some orange blossom.

  ‘It’s my own little paradise,’ she said.

  For Roza Moreno, the quilt that kept both her and her devoted husband warm at night was a profoundly symbolic work.

  ‘Even if I live for another thousand years,’ she said, ‘it will never be finished. It had a beginning but it will never have an end.’

  Roza’s words lodged themselves in Katerina’s mind. For ever after, love and sewing would be linked.

  Not many minutes before Saul arrived home, Katerina completed her final stitch and proudly put her finished work down on the table, replacing the tiny needle in the cushioned lid of the sewing box.

  ‘This is beautiful, Katerina,’ said Roza putting her own sewing aside to admire it. She had been watching the child working on this piece for some weeks now, and without doubt it was the best thing she had ever done. ‘Shall we find some tissue to wrap it in?’

  Once it was wrapped, it was time for her to go home. The smell of Eugenia’s stuffed vegetables
, gemista, was wafting in from next door and telling her that dinner must be almost ready.

  The debate over the twins’ future was still raging and continued at the supper table.

  ‘But Isaac has left school already!’ whined Sofia.

  ‘So why can’t we?’ continued Maria.

  Eugenia calmly continued to chop the tomatoes for their salad. Her twins had never enjoyed being at school and she knew that they often skipped lessons. It appeared that they had not really seen the purpose of an education in the classroom and wanted to be in the outside world, enjoying their freedom.

  ‘It’s different for Isaac. He has a family business to go into. And he is an apprentice,’ she responded calmly.

  The three girls sat at the table waiting for their dinner. Maria was breaking a piece of bread into tiny pieces, agitated. Sofia, always the spokesman for the pair of them, was determined to pursue the subject.

  ‘So why can’t we be apprentices?’

  ‘You can be. We can try and find an apprenticeship with a weaver. Or I could teach you.’

  ‘But we don’t want to do what you do.’

  Eugenia knew as well as both the twins did that neither of them had the patience for either weaving or sewing. Sofia had once produced a very crude sampler, but Maria’s fingers were not nimble enough even for the most basic of stitches. Nevertheless, Eugenia did not want them to become ‘tobacco girls’. She had no idea where such a life would lead.

  The argument went round in circles. Katerina sat quietly, ate what was put on to her plate and then crept up to bed. She took the gift-wrapped package out of her pocket and put it under her pillow.