The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘Katerina, can I ask you something?’ said Olga.

  The seamstress looked up. She was kneeling on the ground, pinning the hem.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘My husband mentioned something this morning. He said that you were marrying Kyrios Gourgouris. Is it true?’

  Katerina was aghast. It was a moment as extraordinary and shocking as when Gourgouris had made his proposal.

  ‘I . . . I . . . It’s . . .’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Olga, quickly. ‘I was probably jumping to conclusions. It’s just that Kyrios Komninos told me that Grigoris Gourgouris is marrying his best seamstress. At least that’s what he had heard. I just assumed that he must be talking about you.’

  Katerina concentrated hard on her task. She now held the tip of a pin in her mouth, which gave her an excuse not to speak. There had been so many times when Katerina had wanted to confess her feelings to Olga about her son, but it had never seemed right. Now it seemed less appropriate then ever.

  Pavlina had come in with tea for them both. Katerina always sewed the hem in situ and always gave the dress a final press before she left, the whole process taking an hour or two.

  ‘I feel so embarrassed,’ Olga explained to Pavlina. ‘I had heard that Grigoris Gourgouris was to marry his best seamstress, so I assumed it must be Katerina!’ The unfamiliar sound of Olga’s laughter rang out like a bell.

  Pavlina and Katerina exchanged glances and then the latter burst into tears.

  Olga was confused. Pavlina explained to her that Katerina had indeed received a marriage proposal but she had not yet accepted.

  ‘And are you going to?’ Olga asked her directly. ‘It doesn’t seem to fill you with joy, my dear.’

  ‘I don’t love him,’ said Katerina.

  ‘But I’ve told her that even if she feels that way now, things could change once she’s married. Lots of people start their marriages with a bit of uncertainty.’

  ‘She might be right,’ said Olga, looking kindly at Katerina.

  Katerina knew that Olga did not love her husband. Perhaps hers had been the opposite to Pavlina’s marriage. She wondered if Olga had been in love with Konstantinos Komninos to start with and had then fallen out of love. Perhaps the third, ideal way, of being in love and then continuing to be in love did not exist. How could she tell Olga that she was still in love with a dead man? And that the dead man was her son?

  ‘But what do you think I should do?’ Katerina appealed to her, with desperation. Olga would have the final word.

  ‘You could wait for love,’ Olga answered sadly, ‘but there is always the risk that it might never come.’

  The collective wisdom of the three women who cared for her most in the world pushed her towards the inevitable.

  A small wedding was held a month later. Grigoris Gourgouris appeared to have no relatives apart from a nephew, and the only other guests were Eugenia, Sofia, Maria, Pavlina, two of the girls from the finishing room, the manager of the business in Veria and Konstantinos Komninos. Katerina had written to her mother, inviting her to the wedding. Zenia replied offering her congratulations but she had been ill recently and would not be strong enough to come.

  Everyone admired the bride’s simple, pin-tucked wedding gown but she knew she had put less love and effort into it than the hundreds of others she had sewn. The current fashion for straight styles helped to conceal her lack of curves, and with the circle of fresh rosebuds in her dark, bobbed hair she might have passed for a fifteen-year-old.

  After the ceremony, a dinner was held in a private room in the Hermes Palace Hotel, a place where the groom and Konstantinos Komninos seemed at home, but the rest of the guests felt out of place. The Komninos house was the most luxurious place that Katerina had ever visited, but the hotel took the use of marble, gilt and stucco to new levels. Everything about it was excessive, from the quantity of silver cutlery on the table to the flower arrangement that was so enormous it blocked Katerina’s view of most of the guests. Fronds of jasmine and wisteria overflowed from a giant central urn that would have been big enough to fill the entire back yard of her home.

  In front of each place was a row of glasses lined up like organ pipes, most of them full to the brim. Though she had only taken a sip from each one, the alcohol had gone to her head and when they had said farewell to all the guests, it was with some unsteadiness that Katerina climbed the sweeping staircase. She and her new husband were to stay there that night.

  Their first kiss on the night of the marriage almost made her swoon with revulsion. Grigoris’ breath reeked of stale nicotine, and on the lips of someone who had never smoked a single cigarette, the bitter-sour taste of his tobacco-steeped tongue almost made her gag. After the kiss, there was another ordeal to face. Katerina had seen Gourgouris’ legs before when she had once been summoned in to his office to hem new trousers, so the hairiness of his body was no surprise, but the sheer volume of the man when he was not contained inside clothing was more shocking than she could ever have imagined.

  As he unbuttoned his shirt, flesh poured out. For a moment it flowed towards his thighs before it was left hanging there, swinging like an independent being. The surface of this voluminous stomach was criss-crossed with varicose veins, like a river delta, and she now saw that his pendulous breasts were twice as large as her own.

  Meanwhile, Katerina had undressed too and realised that her new husband was scrutinising her. He reached out to touch her scar and quickly withdrew his hand with obvious distaste. Her habit of wearing long sleeves winter and summer meant that her disfigured arm had come as a complete surprise.

  The alcohol had dulled her fear of what was to happen next, but even so she was certain that she was going to die of suffocation, as his enormous bulk rolled on top of her. What he wanted was quickly achieved, and soon, without further conversation, they were on opposite sides of the vast bed. Katerina lay there contemplating the unfamiliar silhouettes of lamps and furniture and before long slipped into a deep sleep. With its smooth linen sheets and plump feather pillows, the four-poster was the ultimate in comfort.

  The following day brought the real introduction to her new life. She had already packed her belongings up in Irini Street and a van was sent round to collect them and to take them to Gourgouris’ home in the west of the city. It was a new and rather characterless house in Sokratous Street, that he had bought two years earlier at the same time that he took over the Moreno business. The house was north-facing with small windows and heavy drapings, but none of these were the reason that it was in a state of semidarkness for most of the day. She discovered that her husband obsessionally kept the light away from his furniture.

  ‘Much better for the upholstery,’ he crowed. ‘Don’t let your furniture fade so fast, Gourgouris likes to make it last.’ It was one of his catchphrases, to which she would have to become accustomed.

  Over the next few months, Katerina would realise that there was nothing he liked more than a glib little rhyme. If he found a sentence with rhyme or rhythm then he would endlessly reuse it, usually accompanied with a cheery smile and the expectation of applause. Each week he took out advertisements on the front page of the newspapers and spent most evenings devising his own straplines.

  ‘Go on! Be glamorous in a Gourgouris gown!’

  On the first day as mistress of the house, Katerina realised that Gourgouris intended for her to stay at home.

  ‘I think you should spend a few days acclimatising yourself here,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll think about whether you need to come back to the workshop. Perhaps just part time?’

  It had not occurred to her that she would stop working. She was dismayed. Even though the other women in the workshop had started to treat her differently when they knew she was to marry Gourgouris, she longed to get back to her seat in the finishing room.

  That morning, she explored her new environment. There were two large rooms on the ground floor, in addition to the kitchen and dining room. One of
them was a drawing room, and the other a study. It was monopolised by a desk and a bookcase that housed a row of alphabetically ordered works of the ancient philosophers. She carefully slid one off the shelf and, when she opened it, the stiffness of the cover betrayed that it had never been read. There was a book standing on its own, with a title she recognised as German: Also Sprach Zarathustra.

  She could not resist opening it. She knew her husband spoke a little German but probably not enough to read fluently. On the title page, there was a dedication: ‘Für Grigoris Gourgouris. Vielen Dank, Hans Schmidt. 14/6/43.’

  She snapped the book shut. It was enough to tell her that Gourgouris had counted a German among his friends. She put it back on the shelf with distaste, resolving to forget that she had ever seen it.

  Every room had the same dark beige linoleum floor, cream Anaglypta on the walls, and the doors, skirting boards, picture rails, and the windowframes and shutters (permanently closed) were all painted a standard solid brown.

  There were a few rugs on the floor and one or two landscape paintings in each room. The furniture was mostly new and some of it looked as if it had never been sat on. A long dining table with eight chairs around it and a candelabra in the centre did not have the slightest scratch, and the matching, glass-fronted sideboard was empty. On top of it was a huge cutglass rose bowl, bereft of flowers.

  Katerina began to unpack her few things, placing an icon, which Eugenia had given her as a wedding gift, on an empty shelf in the drawing room. It looked lonely and out of place in this characterless house. She decided not to put the photograph of Eugenia on the sideboard. Along with the treasured picture of Dimitri, she would keep it in a small box, tucked away in the bottom of her wardrobe.

  The kitchen was well equipped with a new-style cooker, and when she looked in the cupboards she saw nests of aluminium pots and pans. It was very different from Irini Street.

  With impeccable efficiency the shutters had kept the light out, but they had also kept the air in and in each of these gloomy interiors, there was the same suffocating smell of dust and must.

  Katerina wanted to throw open every window and door, and fill vases with fresh flowers, but she assumed that the house must be like this because her husband wanted it this way.

  The space should have been a luxury, but it seemed a waste for two people, and the clutter of colourful rugs, blankets and embroidered cushions that filled her old home felt a world away.

  Up in the master bedroom, there was an enormous empty wardrobe where she hung a few dresses. Considering her occupation, she did not have many clothes, and her husband had already told her that he wanted her to spend the next few months making some outfits for herself.

  ‘My little lass must look lovely!’ he had said that morning, patting her bottom. ‘So you must get to work on making a few things for yourself. You have your sewing machine now, don’t you?’

  The Singer that Konstantinos Komninos had given her a few years earlier had arrived from Irini Street the previous day and was sitting on the floor of the dining room.

  That evening, Gourgouris brought home some lengths of fabric: pale pink gingham, yellow with sprigs of red roses, mint-green stripes. They were not to her taste, but she surmised this was part of the new ‘job’: to dress as her husband wished.

  The maid, it seemed, no longer had a brief to cook. She still came in once a day to sweep and polish the already shiny surfaces, but Gourgouris wanted his wife to cook for him. With trepidation, Katerina began to use the cookery book that Eugenia had bought her for her wedding. In the past she had only ever used recipes handed down by word of mouth, modified according to taste by adjusting the amounts of herbs and spices, so it was strange trying to follow a written recipe.

  She went out for a walk each afternoon, often visiting Eugenia, who had been weaving at home since the end of the war. Occasionally, Eugenia came to Sokratous Street, though she did once tactlessly admit that the big gloomy house gave her the shivers.

  ‘It does me, as well,’ sighed Katerina, ‘but I have to live here . . .’

  They were sitting in Katerina’s kitchen at the enamel-topped table, and the ingredients for dinner were piled up at one end.

  ‘It’s nice and spacious, at least,’ said Eugenia hastily.

  Katerina began to clear their cups. Her husband liked to have three courses each night and she needed to start the preparation.

  ‘How is married life?’ Eugenia asked teasingly.

  ‘I’m managing,’ came the answer, almost too quickly.

  That was the truth of it. She was managing this new life as though it were a business. Tasks had to be performed each day in order to fulfil her role as a wife, cook and housekeeper.

  Gourgouris had decided she should be at home full time. If there was something of particular importance or difficulty he would bring it to the house for her to finish, but he did not want her in the workshop.

  Months passed quietly. Katerina began to make quilts for the bedrooms and began to add the feminine touches that the house seemed to lack. She learned to keep her mind away from past and future, and sewing, as ever, proved to be the way. Every stitch was done in the present, the here and now, and this was how she learned to survive. The past led her back to Dimitri, and the future took her forward to the daily dread of her husband’s return.

  With visits to the Modiano market, cooking, sewing and visiting Eugenia, Katerina kept herself busy, but she was soon to take on another task. Six months after losing her supplementary role as cook, the cleaner had become dissatisfied and handed in her notice.

  ‘I shall place an advertisement in the newspaper tomorrow,’ Gourgouris said, and with every ‘s’ and ‘p’ and ‘t’ he sprayed her with more of the soup that she had made that afternoon. It was a bisque de homard and the russet-brown spots stood out on the pale pink of her dress.

  Katerina nodded. With the huge numbers of people unemployed it should not be too long before someone applied, even if there were plenty of women who would rather beg than clean someone else’s home.

  As she went round with a duster the following day, Katerina discovered that during all these months the cleaner had actually been very slapdash in her work. The surfaces had a superficial shine, but she had never gone underneath cupboards or round the back of furniture. Katerina happily threw open the shutters and began to spring clean. It was a satisfying enough job and the house looked much less forbidding with daylight streaming through the windows.

  She began with the hallway and drawing room and then went into Gourgouris’ study. There were dozens of books but the spines were all unbroken. They were just for show.

  All these will ever do, she thought to herself, regarding the books, is gather dust.

  She did not touch the volume of Nietzsche.

  She moved some papers to one side in order to polish the desk to a shine and then started work on its tarnished brass drawer handles. One of the drawers was half open and something caught her eye. There was a file with two names written in large, neat letters on the cover: ‘MORENO – GOURGOURIS’.

  The sight of her new name and the name of her old friends juxtaposed gave her a jolt. She thought of the Morenos often and, whenever she was with Eugenia, they remembered them with anger and sadness. They still wondered what had happened to Elias; they had not even heard if he had reached Palestine.

  Katerina felt a momentary pang of guilt, knowing that she should not look through her husband’s papers, but nevertheless she found herself opening the drawer and removing the file. For a minute or so she sat at the desk looking at it. It was not too late to put it back but, like a demon, curiosity possessed her and a moment later she had opened it.

  The first item was a single piece of paper with some figures, rather like an invoice, then there was a legal document with several stamps from the Municipality of Thessaloniki and, on thick parchment, the ‘Title Deeds’ of the property in Filipou Street. From what she could tell, the business had been sold to her husband
for a very small sum, a fraction of the price that people would pay even for a house in Irini Street, and he had paid it in a single, lump sum. The business had virtually been given to him.

  Then there was a sheaf of correspondence, all of it predating the sale, and she read the series of letters with increasing shock and disbelief.

  Straight away, she recognised the signature on the first letter. It was the same name as the one that appeared inside the Nietzsche book. A few words of German had become familiar to her during those years of occupation when the officers had been frequent visitors to the workshop. Among them were ‘guten Tag’, ‘bitte’ and ‘danke schön’. It was those words that she saw repeated at the bottom of the letter: ‘Danke schön’ – ‘Thank you’.

  Next there were several carbon copies of letters from her husband to ‘The Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property’ and their replies. She put them in date order and began to read. Her hands were trembling violently.

  The first letter, from Gourgouris, was dated 21 February 1943 and was written from Larissa. Katerina calculated that this was even before the Morenos had left Thessaloniki. In the letter her husband outlined his request to take over the ‘lucrative and thriving business of Moreno & Sons’. He described his already well-established businesses in Veria and Larissa and his desire to expand into larger premises in Thessaloniki. The response to this application asked for evidence of his support for the government. Several letters followed and she felt increasingly nauseous as she read them. There were mentions of several donations of money to the government but in the final one, written in July 1943, there was a list of names. She found herself reading them aloud:

  ‘Matheos Keropoulos, andarte

  Giannis Alahouzos, andarte

  Anastatios Makrakis, andarte

  Gabriel Perez, in hiding with false identity

  Daniel Perez, in hiding with false identity

  Jacob Soustiel, in hiding with Christian family and in possession of false identity

  Solomon Mizrahi, in hiding with Christian family and in possession of false identity’