The tremors had not lasted long, but the damage they had done was catastrophic. In the space of a few minutes, the foundations of every building in the city had been subject to a violent shaking and many of them were not designed to withstand it. For a short time there was silence and then began the continual sound of sirens.
As fast as they could, stepping over piles of debris and fallen masonry, Katerina and Dimitri made their way down the hill towards Aristotelous Square. The wide-open space seemed to offer a measure of safety and hundreds of people had gathered there. They stood about, some crying but others too shocked even for tears. There had been a premonitory quake the previous day, but no one had expected an earthquake of such magnitude.
Dimitri and Katerina did not stop there. There was something that concerned them much more than their own safety.
Turning left at the seafront, they hastened along Niki Street.
‘She’ll be so afraid in that house, all on her own,’ fretted Katerina.
‘I should have been more insistent about her having another live-in housekeeper,’ said Dimitri, as they hurried along, keeping to the middle of the road to avoid any falling masonry. ‘She wouldn’t even hear of it. And you know how many times I suggested it to her . . .’
Since Pavlina’s death fifteen years earlier, Olga had lived alone in the Niki Street mansion. She had less desire than ever to be parted from her unique view of the Gulf, which she sat and watched for hours on end. The vista of the constantly changing sea and mysterious Mount Olympus had never ceased to mesmerise her. Before they had gone away, her grandchildren had continued to call in to see her every other day and each had a ‘bedroom’ where they sometimes did their homework. The house in Irini Street had been very cramped for two growing children.
As Dimitri and Katerina hurried along the seafront, the light of the full moon illuminated the extent of the devastation. Some buildings had sustained considerable damage, others had survived almost unscathed. They held hands and quickened their pace.
Katerina had grabbed their key to Olga’s house before they left Irini Street and her fingers grasped it nervously inside her pocket. When the house came into view, fifty metres away, they saw with relief that it appeared undamaged.
Only when they came closer did they realise that the façade was the only part of the house that remained standing. Behind it lay the wreckage of the entire building. Roof, floors and the three other outside walls of the house had all collapsed.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Dimitri. ‘My poor mother.’
There was not even the slightest possibility that anyone could have survived beneath such a weight of stone, brick, concrete and metal girder.
Katerina stood there, too numb with disbelief to speak. She held on to Dimitri’s arm to steady herself and the useless key fell from her hand into the dust.
‘Are you sure there is no point?’ she eventually managed to say when her sobs had subsided.
‘I’ll go and see if I can find someone, but it’s going to be so dangerous even going in there.’
The scale of the house meant that it would be a daunting task to search for a survivor, but Dimitri managed to find someone in charge of rescue efforts and was promised that a working party would be sent as soon as it was light.
Katerina and Dimitri kept vigil through the night. They needed to keep Olga company, whether she was dead or alive. At dawn, a group of men arrived with shovels and saws and ventured into the wreckage. Dimitri went in with them.
To Katerina it seemed an age before her husband returned. In fact it was less than thirty minutes. When he reappeared, his hair was white with dust and his face pale with sadness.
‘We’ve found her . . .’ he said.
Katerina held Dimitri in her arms as he wept, his body shuddering with great spasms of grief.
A beam had landed diagonally across Olga’s pelvis and chest and trapped her. They were now waiting to put the machinery in place in order to lift it and free her.
‘It looked as if she was lying on the chaise longue,’ said Dimitri. ‘I got a glimpse of the fabric. I know it sounds odd, and I couldn’t see her face very clearly, but I think she looked quite peaceful, almost serene.’
Katerina managed a smile.
She was glad that Dimitri’s image of his mother’s beautiful face was untarnished.
Once they had watched Olga’s body being carefully carried out, they stood there for a few minutes. Katerina was praying. Dimitri had been told to go to the municipal morgue the following day as he would need to formally identify his mother’s body and they knew that, sooner or later, they must return to Irini Street.
Just as they were about to leave, one of the rescuers appeared. He was holding something out to Dimitri.
‘We found these,’ he said. ‘They must have been lying on your mother’s chest when the beam fell across her and were wedged underneath it. We thought you might like them. I’m not sure you’ll be able to salvage much else in there. It’s a terrible mess.’
The man’s tactless words did not affect Dimitri and he took the package of letters with a nod of thanks and, after a cursory glance, put them in his pocket. It would have been impossible to convey to him how little he cared that his father’s priceless collections of objets d’art, clocks, paintings and figurines had been pulverised.
As he and Katerina walked away, he took one last look back at the mansion’s empty façade. It was all that now remained of Konstantinos Komninos’ fortune.
Their normal way home was blocked by fallen masonry and many times they found the road was impassable. Eventually they came to the edge of the old town and, via a circuitous route, finally reached Irini Street.
When they turned the corner they were confronted with a scene of utter devastation.
Not one of the houses in the street had survived. Each one was reduced to its original elements of stone, wood and plaster. Irini Street may have withstood the fire of sixty years before, but nature’s seismic power had finally brought it down.
Silently, the couple surveyed the scene. Dimitri had half expected what they saw. The damage done in the neighbouring streets had given him a sense of foreboding, and even as they had been leaving the workshop the night before he had noticed a floor-to-ceiling crack. There had seemed no purpose in pointing it out to Katerina at the time. The building had been flattened, as if carelessly trampled by a giant.
For a while neither of them spoke. The loss of Olga weighed heavily on their minds and they were still numb from the shock of it. Somewhere in the distance they heard the wail of an ambulance, which triggered precisely the same thought in each of their minds: ‘Thank goodness our children are far away from here.’
Morning was just turning to afternoon, and the heat was rising. A slight breeze stirred the great volume of dust to which their house had been reduced.
Other residents of the street were poking about in the dereliction.
‘It’s futile,’ said one of their neighbours. ‘There’s nothing salvageable in my place. Not even a knife and fork.’
People stood around. Most seemed to agree that it was pointless to venture into the spaces that had once been their homes. They valued their lives more than their possessions.
Katerina was agitated. She did not share the prevailing sense of resignation.
‘Dimitri,’ she said, ‘we have to go into our house. There’s something we need to rescue.’
‘Something worth risking our lives for?’ her husband replied.
‘Perhaps,’ she answered.
Without waiting for Katerina to answer, Dimitri had pushed open the front door of their house. It fell in with a crash and the doorframe went with it. With a gasp, Katerina ran forward.
She heard Dimitri calling out, ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ve got it, agapi mou.’
After several moments he reappeared, struggling over the threshold with a small trunk in his arms.
‘Let me take one of the handles,’ said Katerina, relieved to
see him.
A few yards from the house, they put the box down on the cobbles. Its metal frame had protected it from the weight of the ceiling that had fallen in, and when Katerina lifted the lid she saw that the contents were safe.
The problem of where they were to sleep was easily solved. Old friends urged them to borrow the spare bedroom in their apartment, and for many weeks they were to camp there, with nothing but some borrowed clothes hanging on the back of the door and the trunk on the floor in the corner.
Their immediate priority was to arrange Olga’s funeral. Her death was a devastating blow to the whole family but Dimitri felt it most keenly. He had never known such grief. In her quiet way, Olga had been his rock, and even in the years of his absence, the knowledge of her love and understanding for what he was fighting for had sustained him. She had no power to influence her father, but he had never faulted her for that.
During the interment, Dimitri was aware of nothing but the long, slim box going into the darkness and his tears created a misty world through which his wife patiently led him.
The priest sang the Kyrie Eleison as the four family members each dropped a flower onto the coffin before the marble lid was fitted into place. The stonemason had already done his work.
Olga Komninos
Beloved Mother of Dimitri
Cherished Friend of Katerina
Adored Grandmother of Theodoris and Olga
We will always remember you
There were a hundred graves in the cemetery, most of them well tended and constructed from the same pale, veined marble. The scale and design tended to reflect the status of the family, and the Komninos plot occupied a sizeable space where five generations of the family had been buried. Steps led down to a vault.
Something caught Katerina’s eye that day. On Leonidas Komninos’ tomb there was a photograph of him in his officer’s uniform, complete with a row of medals. Even though it was a formal portrait in which he was obliged to look serious, his eyes smiled. It was not the picture that struck Katerina as strange, however, it was the spray of wilted roses next to it that puzzled her. On the adjacent tomb, that of Dimitri’s father, there were none.
A week later, when Olga’s will was read, the reason for the flowers became a little more apparent.
There was a generous bequest for each of the children and a few pieces of jewellery for Katerina that had been kept in the bank for some years. Olga was left a ruby necklace whose gems were so large that none of her friends in America believed they were real. Dimitri’s request that he should not inherit even a drachma of his father’s money had been respected. The business had already been sold to pay for the wing of a new hospital, helping to compensate for his thwarted ambition to become a doctor.
There was a codicil to the will. Instructions had been left for fresh flowers to be placed on Leonidas Komninos’ grave every Friday morning. There was no explanation. Dimitri knew that his mother had admired her brother-in-law for his courage, and he had grown up with the knowledge that he was a man of honour and bravery, the opposite of his father in every way.
The will was read by the same lawyer Katerina had visited when Gourgouris had died, and the moment of mutual recognition was the only moment of levity in the whole encounter. The inevitability of his survival and ability to profit from disaster struck Katerina as almost absurd.
The ten days following the earthquake left the couple exhausted. They had already trekked around the city looking at potential homes and business premises, and on the night of the reading of the will they were retiring early. Katerina was sitting on the edge of their borrowed bed in a Crimplene nightgown lent by her friend. Dimitri was reading a newspaper.
‘Dimitri,’ she said, ‘were your mother’s feelings for your uncle common knowledge?’
‘I doubt it,’ replied Dimitri. ‘I think everyone admired him, though. Except perhaps my father.’
‘But do you remember him?’
‘I have a few dim memories but I must have been very young.’ said Dimitri. ‘I just remember him being very tall and the sound of laughter when he was around.’
He suddenly remembered the packet of letters he had been handed after they had lifted his mother from the wreckage. He had tucked them into the trunk.
Katerina watched him lift the lid.
‘You remember the letters my mother was reading the night of the earthquake? They were from my uncle. I saw his name on the outside.’
He handed her the packet.
‘It doesn’t seem quite right to read them,’ she said gingerly.
‘I think it’s allowed when both the writer and the recipient are dead,’ Dimitri reassured her.
Feeling like a spy, Katerina slid the first letter from beneath the ribbon and began to read. There were a dozen or more, all with different postmarks and written between 1915 and 1922. Without even a hint of impropriety there was nevertheless an obvious warmth and intimacy. Many of them ended with the words, ‘Please send my regards to my brother.’
After an hour or so of reading Katerina opened the last letter. It had been written in Smyrna and was dated September 1922.
Dear Olga,
At this moment, I am ashamed to be Greek. Many of my men have behaved no better than the Turks and I have witnessed things from which my mind will never be cleansed. In all these past months, there was only one moment which made any sense. It’s the only reason I knew there was still some humanity left inside me. I rescued a child. She was about to be trampled and I plucked her from the ground and held her up above the crowd. The skin on her arm was so badly burned it was falling away from the flesh, but I tore off my shirtsleeve, used it to wrap her wound and delivered her onto a boat. It felt like the only good thing I have ever achieved.
I feel sick at the thought of the other things I have done. God knows, I have asked for forgiveness but however often I am blessed by a priest, the memory is still there. I think of that child and wonder if she is still alive. I doubt it. But I did what I could.
Please give my kisses to little Dimitri. I hope he will never see the things I have seen. Tell him his uncle misses him and as soon as I am back, he can have my buttons to play with. They are stained with blood, Olga, and will need polishing.
You remain, as always, in my thoughts.
With warmest regards,
Leonidas
Dimitri was now undressing, obliviously chatting to his wife as he did so.
‘It’s a pity he isn’t still around,’ he said. ‘It would have been nice if you’d met him too.’
Katerina reread the letter and then looked up at her husband.
‘I think I did, Dimitri,’ she whispered. ‘I think I did.’
Epilogue
MANY HOURS HAD passed since Mitsos had come back to his grandparents’ apartment.
Katerina took her grandson’s hand and stroked it affectionately.
‘Every day, I wake up and feel so lucky that I arrived in this city, Mitsos. Life might have been very different – I could easily have died in Smyrna, or in Mytilini, or gone to Athens and starved. But I didn’t. Call it what you will, but I would say that Fate brought me here.’
‘I can see why you feel so connected here,’ responded the young man. ‘I really had no idea . . .’
‘If Uncle Leonidas hadn’t rescued me, then I would never have got to Thessaloniki at all, would I?’ she smiled at him.
‘The only really unhappy years of my life,’ said Dimitri, ‘were the ones when I was away from here. All that time I yearned for the horror to end so I could return to this city, to marry your grandmother.’
Mitsos sat quietly, listening with rapt attention as the two of them spoke with love and passion of their home.
‘So you see, Mitsos, all our experiences are rooted here. We could go somewhere else and the memories would live on in our minds, but they are much more vivid here, in the place where everything happened.’
‘We could easily light candles in London or Boston for those we hav
e loved,’ added his grandfather, ‘but it wouldn’t be the same.’
Each time Mitsos had visited his grandparents, he had been taken to the cemetery where he had watched his grandmother tending the family tomb. He knew that she went every week to sweep around the graves, to make sure the oil lamps still burned and to take fresh flowers. Watching over these activities was a statue of Olga. One year after her death, his grandparents had commissioned the best sculptor in the city and the seated figure was a breathtaking likeness, with its long, elegant limbs and patient expression.
Mitsos sat there thoughtfully, reminded of the words the blind man had spoken to him only that morning. The notion that all those people who had lived in Thessaloniki had left part of themselves behind suddenly seemed very real to him.
‘There’s something else, as well as the memories, that we keep here for our friends. They left some treasures behind too.’
In the corner of the living room, covered over with a white, lace-edged cloth, there was a wooden trunk. Katerina carefully removed the vase of artificial flowers and framed pictures of her children and grandchildren, took off the cloth and folded it. Then she lifted the lid.
‘This is another reason we stay,’ she said. ‘These things don’t belong to us, and even though their owners might never return, it seems wrong to take them away. We have merely been custodians.’
She lifted out the ornate red silk quilt inside which the ancient tallit had been sewn, several small cushions and two books. There was also the icon of Agios Andreas, which had been carried all the way from the Black Sea. When Eugenia had died, Katerina had wrapped it inside some silk and put it in the trunk for safekeeping.
‘We’re taking the quilt to the Jewish Museum in Agios Mina Street for their archive,’ said Dimitri. ‘They seemed very pleased when we went in to tell them what we had.’
‘I want to keep the cushions, though,’ said Katerina. ‘In case the families return. Even Elias might come back one day. And there is the letter that the Muslim family left for us and the two books.’