The Silence of Scheherazade Read online

  Before going for his coffee, Akis gave Stavros’s shoulder a gentle pat and murmured, ‘Watch out, son. Be careful. Don’t believe everything the Europeans say. Don’t fall for their tricks. They’ll make you their pawns and we’ll become the bait for a bigger fish.’

  The boys’ happiness had dissipated. They headed across the square in the direction of the British Hospital, kicking up stones and dust with the toes of their shoes as they went. The air was beginning to fill with the smell of food being fried in people’s homes, and a woman was softly singing the folksong Afroula and Tasoula had chanted earlier.

  ‘Aman, aman, yaniyorum ben

  Aman, aman, seviyorum sen.

  ‘Oh, oh, burning, I am

  Oh, oh, it’s loving you, I am.’

  From far away a ferryboat blew its whistle. Men from the municipality came into the square with long tapers in their hands to light the street lamps. Thunder rumbled from beyond the mountains. Panagiota got up. She had promised to help her mother fry the fish that Fisherman Yorgo had brought that morning, and she also had to buy some bread. Kissing Auntie Rozi, she waited while the old woman made the sign of the cross three times over her head for luck. She’d got so tall that she had to lean down almost to the ground for the old woman to reach her.

  Stavros, hands in his pockets, was still scuffing up stones and dust over on the British Hospital side of the square. Panagiota slowed her steps. Maybe she could exchange a word or two with him on her way to the bakery. Minas and a couple of the others whistled after her. Stavros didn’t join in, but before Panagiota turned into Menekse Street she glanced back into the square and their eyes met. A wave as hot as a desert wind tore through her.

  Nibbling on the end of a loaf of hot, fresh bread, her heart brimming – whether with happiness or pain, she couldn’t tell – she went in through the blue door next to her father’s grocery shop and skipped up the wooden stairs to their home. Joy was spreading through her, rising like a spark from the base of her spine, but she also wanted to cry. Swarthy-faced, tousle-haired, sweaty Stavros had stood there on the British Hospital side of the square and hadn’t taken his eyes off her as she made her way from the bakery to the house. Her plaits, the top of her head, her ankles – every single part of her that his eyes had touched was trembling.

  By the time she got to the kitchen, where her mother was dipping the fish in flour, her emotions were all over the place. Knowing full well that it would annoy her mother, she began to whistle, even though just a moment ago she’d felt like crying her heart out. She longed for tomorrow, so that she could see Stavros again. But… But if the Greek fleet really did arrive tomorrow, her father would never allow her out. She wouldn’t be able to see him for a whole day. The thought made her moan as if she were drowning.

  ‘What happened, kori mou? Kala ise? Are you okay?’

  ‘The Greek army is coming, Manoula. Mama dearest. Did you hear?’

  ‘Let’s hope it is for the best, yavri mou. My child. Let’s hope it’s for the best.’

  ‘Our teacher has always said that when that great day comes, the whole class will go down to the quay to greet them. I’m going to wear my white dress tomorrow. We must make a crown of laurel leaves for my hair this evening. Let’s get the Greek flag we sewed out of the trunk.’

  Katina wiped her floury hands on her apron and turned to her daughter. When she squinted her eyes, which were small anyway, she looked like a Chinese woman. A tiny, red-haired, freckle-faced Chinese woman.

  ‘Your father doesn’t want you to go to school tomorrow.’

  Panagiota had been expecting this, but she was surprised her father had found the time to speak to her mother already.

  ‘Manoula! Have mercy! How could you! The whole class will be there, and I have to stay home? Eleos! Mercy! I can’t believe it! Oof!’

  ‘It could be dangerous, my child. These are not safe times. The Turks are already organized. They’re going to release the prisoners from jail. How could we send you out there all by yourself?’

  Panagiota was used to her mother’s unfounded anxieties. Since she’d lost her sons, Katina had become even more protective of her daughter, forever apprehensive about things that might, or might not, happen to her.

  Panagiota rolled her eyes. ‘Where did this “all by yourself” come from? The whole class will go down to the docks together. The girls from Kentrikon School will be there, and so will the girls from Agios Dimitris – Elpiniki, Adriana… Even the younger ones will go. The boys from the Evangelical School. Everyone. We’re going to go down to the quay like Ancient Greek goddesses. We’ll strew flowers in the soldiers’ paths. Mama, please, I beg you. We’ve been preparing for this day for months – don’t make me miss it. Speak to Papa, get him to give me permission. Se parakalo. Please, dear Mama, Manoula mou.’

  Katina gave the dish of floured fish to her daughter and lit the coals under the lower rack of the woodstove with fatwood. ‘Ela. We shall see. You fry the fish, I’ll set the table. I made artichokes too. Go and cut some dill and sprinkle it on the artichokes. It looks like rain, so we’ll eat inside.’

  Just as she was going through the kitchen door into the hallway, Katina turned back. She barely came up to her daughter’s shoulder. ‘Panagiota mou, my dear Panagiota, se parakalo, keep a smile on your face until your father comes upstairs, please, my beautiful daughter. You know that we cannot bear to see you unhappy. Come, don’t break your dear mother and father’s hearts, my child. We have endured enough.’

  Alone in the kitchen, Panagiota stamped her clogs on the floor. Her father was probably the only royalist in all of Smyrna. Everyone else was in love with the charismatic prime minister of Greece, Venizelos. Most of all, Stavros. Ah, Stavros! She wouldn’t see him until tomorrow evening now. Once again, she could hardly breathe. She held one of the mackerels by its tail, dipped it into the frying pan, then quickly took it out again. The oil was hot, sizzling. Nothing mattered any more, save for those moments when she could breathe the same air as Stavros. As she fried the fish one by one, she muttered to herself, even though she knew this would make Stavros sad, ‘I hope they don’t come and disturb our peace.’

  She was already jealous of Stavros’s dream of a Greater Greece; this Megali Idea.

  Home Alone

  In the early hours of 15 May, as Grocer Akis was going off for his coffee, having left his tearful daughter and desperate wife locked up in the house, Edith opened her eyes in fear from beneath her white mosquito netting. She’d had a nightmare. In it, she was running away. She had killed someone, and for the rest of her life she would be a fugitive, on the run from the law. She was at a station, trying to catch a train that would take her far away. Ottoman soldiers, wearing aubergine-coloured fezzes with gold trim, were chasing her.

  Trains featured frequently in Edith’s dreams, for the house she had inherited from her father, Nikolas Dimos, was right next to the Aydin Railway track. Most mornings she woke to the whistle of the Boudja train arriving at the station. The old machinist, Tall Kozmas, sounded the whistle on approach, and the mournful noise didn’t let up until the train had come to a standstill and he had jumped down. On some nights, the rumble of the freight train bringing goods from Asia Minor to the docks at Smyrna would keep Edith from sleeping all night long, shaking the windows of Number 7, Vasili Street like an earthquake. In the daytime the rails leading to the quay were used by the horse-drawn trams.

  But this morning it wasn’t Machinist Kozmas’s train or the quivering windowpanes that had woken Edith. Wrapping herself in her lavender-scented sheets, she tried to recall the dream. She felt cold. Who had she killed, she wondered? These escape–pursuit dreams were becoming more common. Since the Boudja train hadn’t come into the station yet, it had to be earlier than eight o’clock; maybe she could sleep a bit longer. Why was it so cold though? Why wasn’t the stove alight and where was Zoe? She should have been there a long time ago and lit the stove and heated the water for the bath as well.

  Zoe, who
’d been a young girl when she worked for Juliette Lamarck, was a married woman now. She lived nearby in the Kerasohori neighbourhood with her husband, an immigrant from Chios, and their small daughter. She came early every morning, lit the stoves, heated the bath water and prepared Edith’s breakfast. Edith had never once known her to be late. What could have happened this morning?

  She had just reached for the bell beside her bed when a great noise rattled the windows. A big explosion. A bomb? Something had exploded… What? She came to her senses as if she’d been hit on the head. Sitting up in the middle of the bed, she hugged herself for warmth. More explosions followed, one after the other; the noise was coming from the harbour. People were screaming for help – were they at the docks?

  The city was being bombarded!

  She put her hands over her mouth, trying to stifle her own cries. Bombarded by who? The British? No, impossible. The German fleet that had been waiting out in the gulf had left a while ago. Then who? The Italians? She leaped out of bed and threw a robe around her shoulders. The explosions hadn’t stopped; the windows were shaking as if they would break. Turks? Greeks?

  Just then, the Boudja train came into the station, blowing its whistle for a long, long time. Pulling her robe tight around her, Edith went out into the corridor in her bare feet. For a moment she felt as if it were the corridor of a different house, and she looked around in surprise. In spite of the rattling windowpanes and the heavy gunfire from the port, the house was unusually silent; instead of the little sounds, whisperings and low laughter of the servants, there was total quiet.

  Even though the servants tried to carry out their morning routines without bothering their mistress, they made quite a racket in comparison to this eerie, mysterious silence. In the eleven years she’d lived there, she’d become accustomed to lying inside her netting with her eyes closed, listening to the lively sounds of the house. The opening and closing of doors, Butler Christo’s footsteps echoing on the veranda, the whispered giggling of the girls sweeping in the library, Zoe scolding them through the low curtain, the muffled laughter in the kitchen in response to Mehmet the cook’s jokes, which he delivered in a voice that carried from the kitchen to the bedrooms, the squeak of the wooden stairs – this morning there was none of that. Instead, there was the boom of gunfire.

  When the explosions ceased, a ship’s whistle sounded and was met by screams for help from the wharf. Now the ringing of church bells was added to the sounds from the city. Edith had learned from Avinash that the insistent ringing of church bells was a means of attracting the attention of foreign warships waiting in the harbour. It was a coded call for assistance in an emergency, a sign between the city’s Christian populace and their allies. Without a doubt, something awful was happening.

  Barefoot, she tiptoed along the dark brown wooden floor of the corridor, opening each door in turn: the library, the guest room, another guest room. The rooms Edith didn’t use were fully furnished, but this morning they all looked empty and abandoned. Nothing moved except for the dust dancing in the light streaming through the windows. She went into the bathroom at the end of the corridor and closed the door. The water in the basin was icy. She washed her face and sat on the toilet’s cold porcelain.

  Her breathing was rapid and her underarms were wet in spite of the chill. A strange smell was coming off her skin; the smell of fear.

  Although Edith had shown courage as a woman living on her own in Smyrna, she had never once in her thirty years of life opened her eyes to an empty house. She may have woken up alone, but she had never been on her own in a house. In her father’s mansion, she had lived with three generations of the family and an army of servants. In France at the convent school she had shared a dormitory with twenty girls. Since she had moved to this house that she’d inherited from Nikolas Dimos, there’d always been someone in the servants’ room on the ground floor. And both Butler Christo and Zoe, who was now her housekeeper, always arrived at the house before she woke.

  This was the first time she’d ever been in a place devoid of the sound or breath of another person.

  More than the bombardment outside, the situation inside the house frightened her, but because she didn’t consider fear an appropriate sentiment, she neither recognized nor felt it, even though the smell of fear was coming off her skin. Just as Juliette masked her sorrow and desperation with anger, Edith met fear with ridicule and biting sarcasm, having long since banished it to somewhere deep inside her.

  Coming out of the bathroom, she glanced warily over the rooms of the empty house, which looked as if they belonged to a different era. The wooden floor beneath her feet was like ice. She wrapped her arms around herself. Maybe she’d entered another dimension, as with the space–time theories her father, Monsieur Lamarck, had loved explaining to her while they’d wandered arm in arm around the Bournabat garden at twilight. She had travelled through time while she was asleep and woken to find herself at a different point in history. Or in a different world, like in the Jules Verne novel that she and Edward had read together, lying side by side. The house was the same house, Edith was the same person, but everything else had vanished. If she looked out the window, maybe she would see a scene from a century in the future. Squinting, she looked up to the ceiling.

  Gypsy Yasemin hadn’t been making it up or exaggerating: Edith was indeed a hashish addict. Without getting high, she couldn’t make love; without the pipe’s touch on her lips, she couldn’t sleep; she couldn’t even join a social gathering without taking a few puffs. She justified her addiction by saying, ‘People are so stupid, Avinash, that it is the only way I can endure their boring conversation.’ More often than not, she was high, and now, wandering around the empty rooms of her house like an anxious stranger and thinking about time travel, she couldn’t make up her mind whether this was reality or an illusion. Whatever Yasemin was mixing with the weed in her bundle affected Edith even in her daydreams, even when she was not under the influence. She saw everything from behind a curtain of fog.

  Rather than go near the windows with their rattling panes, she started down the stairs, trying not to make them squeak. The noise of the guns was not so frequent now, but her ears picked up other sounds. Was music being played somewhere? And what about those screams? They were not screams of fear, but they were… Suddenly she saw something that made her heart jump. Down there, on the other side of the door, a silhouette was visible through the colourful stained glass – a man! A man was forcing the door open! She almost lost her balance and fell down the stairs. Grabbing the bannister with one hand, she stopped herself.

  An image that had been coming in and out of her subconscious since she’d woken up gained clarity. Of course! It was the Greek landing. She felt relief. The world remained in its place. Neither reality nor time had changed.

  Last night before dinner Avinash had stopped by and said that it was now official: the Greek fleet was going to enter Smyrna. The British general had informed Smyrna’s Turkish governor, Izzet Pasha, that the Ottoman administration was to have its soldiers wait at the governor’s building ready to transfer power over to the Greeks.

  At that point, Edith’s servant girls, who had their ears pressed to the dining room door so as to hear what the Indian spy was saying, forgot themselves in their excitement and began to squeal with delight. When Edith went out into the hall to scold them, she found them all hugging each other and crying tears of joy.

  Still… Still, she hadn’t expected it would happen so soon – the very next day. Quite honestly, she hadn’t taken Avinash’s agitation seriously; after all, rumours of the Greek landing had been circulating ever since the war had ended. Her anxious spy lover hadn’t stayed for dinner as he needed to work through the night at the consulate. Kissing Edith hurriedly, he’d been oddly imperious with his instructions.

  ‘Close all the doors, windows and shutters,’ he ordered, ‘and don’t send the butler back to his home tonight. Mehmet and Zoe should leave right now; give them permission to go, and
tell them not to come tomorrow. And do not go out of the house until I return.’

  Hating to be dictated to by anyone, Edith had immediately sent Butler Christo off to his home, and then ate her dinner at the huge table all by herself, served by the girls, who were chattering in the kitchen like birds. Mehmet the cook and Zoe went to their homes in the city right after sunset, as they did every evening. It had begun to rain, but she still didn’t close the shutters.

  The dong of the front doorbell reverberated around the high-ceilinged hall like a series of explosions. A jolt of electricity raced down Edith’s spine as the scenario she had long feared but had never acknowledged came into her head: with the city in chaos, looters were taking advantage of the lack of control and attacking the homes of the wealthy.

  Like all Levantine children, Edith had grown up hearing horror stories of bandits coming down from the mountains to rob the mansions and large estates, and pirates from Chios kidnapping babies for ransoms. Her own big brother, Jean-Pierre, had been rescued from a cart when he was little by their butler, Mustafa. Just a few months ago, the son of the former governor had been kidnapped and taken to the mountains by the Circassian bandit Cerkez Ethem. Bournabat’s wealthy British residents had paid 53,000 gold coins to secure his release.

  And now, proving both her mother and Avinash, who’d been insisting for years that she employ an armed guard, correct, marauders had come to her door first.

  Mon Dieu!

  She ran down the stairs. Breathing deeply, she opened the cupboard beside the front door and grabbed the hunting rifle left from the time of Nikolas Dimos. She didn’t know whether there were shells in it, but she had learned to shoot a gun on hunting expeditions with her father and their Bournabat neighbours. Without waiting for the bell to ring a second time, she opened the door and aimed the shotgun between the looter’s eyebrows.