The Thread (43 page)

‘You’ll be comfortable for the rest of your life!’ Eugenia exclaimed.

Katerina sat quietly, waiting for her to calm down.

‘But I have a comfortable life now,’ she said.

‘Well, if you turn him down, even your job will be gone,’ she said bluntly. ‘He won’t be happy if you say no, mark my words.’

‘But I don’t love him,’ Katerina said, and after a pause added: ‘I loved Dimitri.’

With this inadvertent admission, she broke down in tears.

‘It’s hopeless. I can’t stop thinking about him. What am I going to do?’

Eugenia had no answer to this, but later that evening they talked again.

‘There have been plenty of arranged marriages in the past,’ Eugenia explained. ‘There used to be lots in our village, one family wanting a connection with another. Perhaps in time, you will grow to love Kyrios Gourgouris.’

‘But supposing I don’t?’

According to Eugenia, the absence of love was no obstacle. Marriages in the villages had often worked quite well without.

They talked well into the night but at midnight, when she went to bed, Katerina knew that she would not be able to give her employer an answer.

First thing the following morning, she knocked boldly on his office door. By then she had prepared exactly what she was going to say.

‘Thank you very much for your proposal, Kyrios Gourgouris. I am very flattered but I need a little more time to think. I have to take into consideration whether I am the right person to be your wife. I hope you will allow me the space of one more week in order to consider.’

She almost curtsied before leaving the room and Gourgouris smiled back, as if charmed by her little speech.

When she entered the workshop, Katerina found the other women whispering. It seemed that word of their employer’s proposal to Katerina had somehow leaked out. None of the women asked her directly, but she could tell from their glances that she was the subject of their gossip and felt her face go crimson with embarrassment.

The next day, Gourgouris commenced his campaign to win Katerina over. Each evening, she found a little gift tucked into her bag or pocket: a small piece of silk, some lace, once, even, some ready-to-wear lingerie. There was often a note: ‘Just a glimpse of your trousseau.’ In his view, no woman would ever be able to resist such a seduction technique.

The softness of silk, the coolness of crêpe, the lusciousness of lace, he thought to himself, as he furtively dropped the little packages into Katerina’s bag or slipped them into the pocket of her coat, which hung in the cloakroom. ‘I must use that line in my new advertisement.’

The sessions where he would call her to his office to vilify her work immediately ceased, which was a relief to her, but the gifts made her feel slightly nauseous. Time was passing and there were only five days now until she had promised to give her answer. She knew Eugenia’s opinion and it had not been the one she had wanted to hear.

The following day she was due to deliver the final mourning dress to Kyria Komninos. The seasons had changed, and the fine cotton one she needed was now ready.

When she opened the door, Pavlina could see straight away that something had happened to Katerina. She had hoped that the young woman might be getting over Dimitri’s death …

‘What’s wrong?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve got bigger shadows than ever!’

Katerina had not slept for two nights and the skin under her eyes looked bruised.

‘Come in! Come in!’ urged Pavlina. ‘Come and tell me all about it.’

Over the kitchen table, Katerina told Pavlina about the proposal.

‘But what shall I do?’ she asked.

‘Well, I’m not the one to ask,’ Pavlina said bluntly. ‘I loved the man I married from the moment I set eyes on him. And it lasted until the day he died. In fact, it lasted well beyond that.’

‘So how can I even think of marrying, when I love someone else?’ she asked, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Even if he is just a memory.’

‘It’s different, Katerina,’ said Pavlina. ‘I was in my forties when Giorgos died. We met when I was fifteen and we had twenty-five years together. I was lucky, but you must think of the future.’

They were meant to be kind, but the words sounded harsh.
The future
. It was a landscape without love.

‘And it won’t be long until you’re thirty …’

‘I think I know what I should do,’ said Katerina after a few moments’ reflection, ‘but it’s a question of whether I can bring myself to.’

It seemed wrong that her cotton handkerchief was soaked with tears of misery rather than joy. A marriage proposal was meant to be every woman’s goal.

Katerina was shown upstairs to see Olga and together they went into her dressing room where she would try on the dress. Usually, they made small talk about the details that Katerina had sewn onto the garment, and Olga always enquired after Eugenia, but today the young woman was taken by surprise.

‘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.