Olga was happy being back in the warm familiar surroundings of the home where she had grown up, in a street full of gentle memories. All of the families she had known in her childhood years were still in the same houses and were happy to see her again. They soon forgave her for having been such an infrequent visitor since her marriage.
The warmth and closeness of the next few days would be joyful for Olga, but not for Konstantinos. He found the proximity of other people in the neighbouring houses, hearing them through the walls to either side and even in the street below, intolerable. Most houses had become home to several families after the fire. There were refugee camps for those who had been left entirely homeless outside the city, but if you had a brother or a cousin with a roof still over their head, you expected them to share their good fortune. For this reason, several houses in Irini Street, with their overhanging floors and livestock in the basement, became ramshackle homes for anything up to fifteen people, with all the additional noise and chaos that entailed.
Konstantinos made his feelings clear and though Olga had always obeyed what was probably the most important of her marriage vows, namely a promise never to cross her husband, there was a moment when she let slip an unguarded comment.
‘It’s so claustrophobic,’ he complained after one disturbed night.
‘I know it’s not on the seafront, but I like it here.’
‘You grew up in this street, Olga,’ retorted her husband. ‘So you’re used to it!’
‘Well, we’re much better off than most people,’ she said quietly.
Olga had heard stories of the refugee centres that had been set up on the outside of the city for the tens of thousands left homeless by the fire. Though many of them were well-ordered and run by kindly foreigners, everything was rationed and, come the winter, life would be harsh there. The only other option for the seventy thousand homeless (if their relatives could not accommodate them), was to take one of the free trains to Larissa or a boat to Volos, where new housing was being built. The majority of those who had been left destitute were Jews, and thousands of them had no choice but to leave.
Whatever those people had lost, Konstantinos felt that his loss was greater. He was not interested in relative sums. He’d been one of the richest men in the city; now his personal fortune had been reduced more than anyone’s. The insurance company had written to say that the scale of the claims they had received meant that they were unable to offer him the full compensation he had expected.
‘I would rather not be preached at by my wife,’ he retorted. ‘You just can’t see anything wrong with this street, can you?’
‘And all you can see are its faults. So why don’t you find somewhere else to live?’
Olga did not see the hand that flew towards the side of her face. She just felt a single, stinging smack.
Pavlina returned from taking the baby out and was astonished to find Olga sobbing on her bed. When her mistress eventually lifted her head off the pillow to explain, Pavlina was shocked to see the red mark that had been left on her cheek.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ said Pavlina. ‘His father would never have done such a thing. Nor his brother.’
‘And I wasn’t preaching at him, Pavlina. I was just giving my own view.’
‘And then he left, did he?’
‘Yes, and he told me that he is going to stay elsewhere.’
The baby was needing to be fed now, so they could not continue the conversation, but Olga knew that the relationship with her husband would never be the same again.
Once she had recovered from the initial shock of the slap, Olga admitted to herself and to Pavlina that it was a great relief not to have her husband’s thunderous presence in the small house. He sent a message to say that he had returned to the hotel where he had stayed after the fire. It was closer to his rebuilding projects, which was a plausible enough reason to give anyone in Irini Street who might wonder why Kyrios Komninos had moved out.
All was peaceful until a few days later, when Dimitri began to cry a great deal more than usual, and even Pavlina, who prided herself on her skills with the newborn, could do nothing. For someone who had been in the world for less than a month, the baby seemed able to reach an extraordinary volume with his yells.
Olga and Pavlina took turns to hold him in their arms and for hours at a time rocked him back and forth but nothing would stop his crying and no amount of feeding seem to calm him down.
Konstantinos arrived unexpectedly one morning.
‘I can hear our child in the street!’ he shouted, partly in anger but also to make himself heard above the baby’s screams. ‘He must be ill! Why haven’t you called the doctor?’
‘Babies often cry like that once they find their lungs,’ said Pavlina defensively, noticing Olga wince slightly at her husband’s wrath.
Konstantinos spun round to face her.
‘I shall tell Dr Papadakis to come this afternoon,’ he said curtly. ‘I know you have some experience, Pavlina, but I think a trained medical view would be worth getting.’
After this, apart from occasional visits, Konstantinos kept away. He provided as much money as was needed for food but did not stay to eat. He could not feel at home in a street where the animals seemed to outnumber the humans and where he felt as cramped as a pig in a pen.
Dr Papadakis soon appeared in Irini Street. He had never before visited this area of the city and, like Konstantinos Komninos, did not bother to hide his distaste. For the short duration of his visit, he wore the expression of a man on his way to another destination.
He examined mother and baby, and immediately declared that the problem was the mother’s milk supply. It was not adequate. They would need to find a wet nurse for Dimitri.
Olga accepted the diagnosis with some sadness. She had so much enjoyed the closeness of feeding her baby, but she would do whatever was best for him.
The beauty of living in an overcrowded street was that there was always someone close by that you could call on, whether to mend a shoe, catch a rat, or run to the other end of the city with a letter. The solution to the problem of feeding Dimitri was very close at hand.
‘I have almost stopped nursing Elias,’ said Roza. ‘But I have plenty of milk. Do you want me to take over?’
It seemed the most natural thing in the world.
So, within a day, Dimitri was suckling at a different breast. His stomach was full again and he was once again growing strong under his mother’s constant, smiling gaze of adoration. She did not tell her husband the identity of the wet nurse. She knew he would not approve.
Even in this street, which to the rich might seem poor, a strong community thrived. Living cheek by jowl with each other made everyone more tolerant rather than less so.
The children all played together, Christian, Muslim and Jew, and when they played ‘chase’ around the nearby church, or the ruins of a synagogue, or one of the many minarets that still towered over the city, it did not matter to any of them that these were places of worship. The name of the faith they represented was even less important.
They knew there were some differences between them. ‘Why can’t you talk like us, Isaac?’ one of the Christian boys teased. ‘And why can’t you come out to play on Saturday?’ The Muslim boys got teased too. ‘I heard my father saying that your uncle was drunk last night!’ ‘So? My mother says that as long as he doesn’t buy raki himself, then it’s all right!’ This was how they lived in Irini Street, with tolerance and the habitual turning of a blind eye.
In November, there was a trial in the city that everyone followed with great interest. The couple who lived in the house where the great fire had supposedly started were accused of arson. Konstantinos, who was now visiting his wife in Irini Street less than once a week, happened to call in on the day of the verdict and was vehement that the fire had been an illegal act.
The couple had been acquitted, but it was against Konstantinos’ nature to believe that such a catastrophe could have been a random eve
nt and he needed someone on whom to focus his anger for such losses.
‘So, we’re supposed to believe that the destruction of our city was just an accident?’ he said, banging his fist down on the table.
It was a question that required no response. Olga did not dare to disagree with her husband over anything at all these days, though she quietly believed that the fact that the couple had lost everything they owned suggested their innocence.
On that particular morning, Komninos scarcely acknowledged his wife and baby. He only had eyes for the newspaper. Olga stood at the stove stirring her husband’s coffee and observed that it took precisely the same amount of time for his anger to reach boiling point as it did for the dark liquid to rise in the briki. She poured it into the tiny cup, put it on the table beside him and backed away.
The acquittal of the destitute refugees was not the only significant news that day.
All month, there had been daily bulletins of events that were the result of the bitter division within Greece. Just before the devastating fire, King Constantine had left the country and been replaced by his second son, Alexander, who had defied his father to support Venizelos. After purging the army of royalists, Venizelos, once again Prime Minister, had led a superficially united Greece into war on the side of the Allies. As a result, Leonidas Komninos had gone to fight on the Macedonian front in the north of Greece.
The supplying of cloth for army uniforms had proved to be good business for Konstantinos Komninos. Every day of conflict could bring him huge riches. If he could get the business back on its feet, millions of drachmas could be his, and even with the infrastructure of the city in chaos, he could work the situation to his advantage.
Olga watched her husband as he swiftly leafed through the newspaper, taking in the rest of the day’s news with hardly a glance. He was not going to spend much time mulling over the events of the war, even though his own brother was on the front line commanding troops. The only thing that interested him now was getting back to the warehouse, where scaffolding was being erected that day.
Komninos downed his coffee in one gulp before getting up, pecking Olga on the cheek and touching the baby’s head. Dimitri was draped across her left shoulder in a deep slumber, oblivious to all the troubles of the world. Roza Moreno had just left and it would be a few hours before the baby stirred. His contentment and innocence were absolute.
‘Is everything all right here? How’s the baby sleeping?’ His questions tumbled out one after the other, none of them requiring an answer. He was in a hurry to go and Olga had no desire to detain him.
‘The warehouse should be ready in a few months,’ he said. ‘And then there’s the showroom to sort out. After that I’ll see what we can do about the house.’
And then he was gone. Olga stood at the doorway and watched the dapper figure swiftly retreating down the cobbled street. His dark, well-cut suit and felt hat stood out among the outfits worn by the residents of Irini Street. What struck her most forcibly was that his walk had virtually broken into a run. He could not get away fast enough.
The months passed happily in Irini Street. The temperatures had dropped, so everyone spent more of their time inside rather than on the street. Roza Moreno came five times a day and, after the late afternoon feed, often stayed for an hour or so having brought her boys with her.
On other days, Olga and Pavlina went next door to the Morenos and Kyria Ekrem would join them, along with her daughters. By the light of a flickering candle, storytelling would commence. There was always a generous slice of toupishti, the honey and walnut cake Roza made from a traditional Jewish recipe, to go with their coffee and, with Elias on her lap, she related the stories of how her ancestors had arrived in Greece more than four centuries ago. She talked as if they had stepped off a boat earlier that same day.
‘There were twenty thousand of us thrown out of Spain,’ she said with mild outrage, ‘but when we reached Thessaloniki, the Sultan was thrilled. “How foolish the Catholic monarchs must be to throw out the Jews. Turkey is all the richer for having them here, and Spain all the poorer!” he cried.’
Occasionally she would drop in a Ladino phrase and then translate.
‘And we thrived here, the largest section of the population! There were dozens of synagogues, and Thessaloniki became known as la Madre de Israel.’
How she loved to talk.
‘We recreated the golden age that we had once had in Spain, right here in Thessaloniki, and we found a familiar mixture of religions here: Muslim, Christian and Jew. We all lived happily together with our separate religions. There was even the same climate and the same food – pomegranates!’ she said smiling.
Saul’s mother, who lived with her son and daughter-in-law, spoke not a word of Greek and only conversed in Ladino. She was always in the corner, wearing her traditional Sephardic outfit, a white blouse embroidered with pearls, a long skirt and apron, a thick satin top coat, trimmed with fur, and a headscarf, also stitched with pearls. Sometimes she would tell a folk tale, which would be translated by her daughter-in-law into Greek.
The Ekrem girls were enthralled by her tales of this faraway city called Granada, which used to have so many mosques and a castle with turrets and writing in Arabic script on its walls. As they nibbled on pieces of the sweet walnut cake, they imagined it as a fairytale place, somewhere unimaginably beautiful and exotic where they might one day go together on a journey. Mrs Ekrem often read from one of her volumes of The Thousand and One Nights and, in the soporific half-light, they imagined their mother as Scheherazade, telling her engaging stories of fate and destiny. She would read a phrase in Turkish for her eldest daughter to translate into Greek.
When they sat there together in the small living space of the Moreno house, there was a curious mixture of fragrances: the herbs and spices they used in their cooking, the incense from church, the narcotic scent from a narghile, candlewax, sweet pastry, the odour of a baby’s nappy and the sickliness of a mother’s milk. When Saul Moreno eventually came in, they caught the sourness of his sweat. He was working hard to keep up with the ever increasing orders for army uniforms.
Dimitri got used to being passed from hand to hand and dandled from knee to knee, hearing a variety of accents and gazing up into different faces. He breathed in the dozen different scents, and loved the embraces from all these different families. For his first few months, all he saw were smiles. And every time he saw one, he smiled back.
‘Mitsi Mitsi Mitsi mou! Mitsi Mitsi Mitsi mou!’ The other children would chant, playing peek-a-boo and using the diminutive of his name.
Throughout these months, Konstantinos continued to supervise the reconstruction of his massive warehouse near the dock, expanding it into the space that had been occupied by the adjacent building, which had been razed to the ground. His perfunctory visits to Irini Street continued, but he could not help showing his distaste at the number and nature of the people who were crowded into houses that were no bigger than wardrobes.
When he came back to his home city on leave, Leonidas found he had no such dislike of Irini Street, and seemed to prefer it to the area in the city centre where his own squalid apartment was situated. Pavlina always welcomed him with a warm meal, Olga with her smile and Dimitri with unconcealed delight. The little boy adored his uncle, who would spend hours singing him nursery rhymes or performing magic tricks, making toffees or coins appear from nowhere. There were squeals of excitement and laughter whenever Uncle Leonidas appeared.
There was an overall rebuilding plan for the entire city that was being drawn up by a Frenchman, Ernest Hébrard. It specified that the small streets would be replaced by boulevards and grand buildings. These would be much more in keeping with the scale of things that merchants such as Komninos aspired to, but while he celebrated the transformation of his city, the Muslims and Jews he shared it with did not. The Moreno family saw with dismay that the area of twisted lanes south of Egnatia Street where many Jews had lived was not going to be rebuilt on the ol
d model and most of the Jewish community was to be pushed towards the outer edge of the city. It was the same for the areas of the city where many Muslims had lived. They were being shunted away from the centre too.
Through the sheer good fortune of having been spared the fire, the quarter where Irini Street was situated was outside the area for replanning. It may have been overcrowded, but it was a harmonious way of life that suited its residents, and none of them ever wanted it to change.
Konstantinos completed the rebuilding of the warehouse, and even before the first anniversary of the fire it was functional again, with a monthly income as high as it had been before – and even greater profits. He would now commence work on the showroom.
In November 1918, the war which had drawn in nations from every corner of the globe came to an end. The Greek divisions fighting on the Macedonian front had helped break German and Bulgarian resistance and the general collapse of Germany had followed. When the Armistice was signed and the victors began to carve up the sprawling Ottoman Empire, Eleftherios Venizelos was hoping that the Greek contribution would be recognised. For many years, he had nurtured a great dream, his ‘megali idea’: to reclaim huge areas of Asia Minor from the Turks and to re-establish the Byzantine Empire. At the time, there were over one million Greeks living in various locations across Asia Minor, many of them in Constantinople. A central part of Venizelos’ dream was to recapture this city, which had been taken from the Greeks in 1453.
As the terms of a treaty were being drawn up, Venizelos was hoping for control of Constantinople and Smyrna, a city on the west coast of Asia Minor. For many Muslims in Thessaloniki it was an uncomfortable time. The Allies had beaten their fellow Muslims in Turkey and they quietly wished that the Ottoman Empire had been victorious.
Before a peace treaty with Germany could be signed, however, Venizelos’ ambition brought about a dangerous new mission for the Greek army. In May 1919, while his brother was counting his profits from the trading of wool and khaki, and his little nephew was playing hide and seek with his friends in Irini Street, Leonidas Komninos was heading towards Asia Minor. With the support of French, British and American ships, twenty thousand Greek troops occupied Smyrna, which was regarded as one of the finest ports in the Aegean.