8,39 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
1922. When the Turkish Army occupies Smyrna, Zoë Haggitiris escapes with her family, only to lose everything. Alone in a sea of desperate strangers, her life is touched, for a moment, by a young English boy, Tom Collyer, also lost, before the compassion of a stranger leads her into a new life. Years later when war breaks out, Tom finds himself in Greece and in the chaos of the British retreat, fate will lead him back to Zoë. But he will discover that the war will not end so easily for either of them.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 631
Ähnliche
THE BLACK EARTH
Philip Kazan
For Helen
Contents
BOOK I
CHAPTER ONE
Smyrna, Asia Minor, 18th September 1922
All night long she lies in the bow of the Thetis and listens to the water beneath her. Curled into the sharp angle between the low gunwales and the varnished pole of the bowsprit, chin propped on the shiny wood, the jib sail creaking just above her head, she stares out into the darkness of the great bay. There is hardly any wind and the yacht is gliding smoothly across low, even waves. She is wearing her favourite white sailor suit, freshly laundered and smelling comfortingly of sunshine and soap. Perhaps she’ll see a flying fish. She hopes she will – or are they sleeping? Is she passing over shoals of dreaming fish, suspended on outspread silver wings? She strains her eyes into the night but there is nothing. The fish won’t fly tonight, she realises. The air is too thick. Why would they throw themselves up out of their cool world into this dense, stinking air?
She stares into the west, where the sun went down huge and deep magenta red, the colour of wild gladiolus flowers. West towards … she doesn’t know. There is nothing to the east. Nothing to the north and south. Thetis can’t fly up. So they are sliding out beyond the bay, out to the edge of the world. Ever since she can remember, which seems like an eternity, although she is only six, she has stared out of her bedroom window towards that line, which swallows up the sun every night, where ships appear and disappear. But she has never been further than Uzunada, the long island, sailing out for parties with their friends, while the flying fish skip like mercury across the blue water. Beyond that, the open sea.
If she could just ask her father … She can hear him behind her, whispering to Mama as he holds the wheel steady. But she doesn’t dare turn round. Mama and Papa have forbidden it: as they had settled her down in the prow of the Thetis – Papa’s yacht, his pride and joy – they had told her that, whatever happened, she mustn’t look back. She had asked why, and they had just shaken their heads – so calm and sensible in spite of all the commotion on the dock, those two heads. There’s nothing behind us, kopella mou. Everything is ahead. Just keep looking ahead, little darling, little bird. And when the sun comes up, it will all be fine.
Why couldn’t she bring Rosie, her pony? Why isn’t Cook with them, or Miss Butland? Why had they had to bundle all their things into Papa’s motor car and drive to Cordelio through crowds of people, Mama sitting beside her in the back, murmuring, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ like a prayer while Papa’s hands gripped the steering wheel so hard that she could see the shape of his finger bones? Papa, who never drove, but always sat behind Murat the chauffeur. When they had gone aboard the Thetis, Papa had kissed her and said, ‘It’s just like the holidays, isn’t it, my little angel?’ But it hadn’t been. No one had said why they’d had to leave home so quickly. Papa is always right, but this doesn’t seem like a holiday. She curls up more tightly on the bed she has claimed for herself, the big rug from the drawing room, folded into the angle of the prow, and closes her eyes. Home is there, pretty as an iced cake: her own house, safe inside its railings. Pink plaster, fretwork gables, chimneys. Lots of chimneys – she loves them. She counts them now inside her head, and it makes her feel better. What else does she love? The front gate. The tree with blossoms like stars. Their wide, clean street. From the front gate you can see the church; if you wait, you’ll hear the shrill, jolly whistle of the train. Mountains behind; in front, quite far off, the blue sea.
Something in the air is making her feel sick. She presses her face into the scratchy, salty rug and tries to go home again. The street swims back into her head, the iron railings, the trees, whitewashed stones lining the swept gravel of the roadway, the whistle of the train … A voice, calling through the carved marble frame of a doorway. Clipped, high-pitched.
‘Zoë!’
‘Yes, Miss Butland!’
A short figure in pleats and lace, a shadow over by the old fig tree, the buzz of wasps in the figs, the green, resinous scent of fig … The shadow ripples, shifts to reveal a face, not young but not old either: tight skin; sharp, upturned nose; round chin; mouth that looks as if it doesn’t know how to smile, but when it does … She’ll do anything to tease out that smile.
‘Érchomai, Miss Butland!’
‘In English, Zoë!’
‘I’m coming, Miss Butland …’
Tea and cakes inside, English tea, English chocolate biscuits from Xenopoulo on Rue des Franques. Running up the path, taking care not to land on the gaps between the paving stones, because she doesn’t want to invite the evil eye. Skipping up the front steps, brushing past Miss Butland, breathing in the smell of sunlight on freshly ironed linen, clean heat and rosewater. Looking up to catch the smile as they both pass into the cool house. Inside, the ticking of many clocks, the soft voice of Mama and her friends coming from an inner room. A ribbon of sweet tobacco smoke. The train whistle again, telling her that Papa is on his way back from the city, from Smyrna, bringing her a little present as he always does: a box of loukoumi from Orisdiback, tied up with a pretty ribbon; a wooden dancing bear from the Turkish man on the corner of Trassa Street.
Until this summer, the biscuits were always from Xenopoulo and the cakes from Portier, but now those things are gone, and when she thinks of them they are slipping past her, slipping past like a carriage of the little train that always whistles as it pulls into Bournabat Station. It has been days since the train last whistled. She went every day to listen for it, and then one day … She hugs herself tightly, but the memory still comes.
‘Zoë! Come here at once!’
Outside the painted black iron of the garden gate, a man lying on his face, half on, half off the line of whitewashed stones. There is a smear of dark red on the whitewash, and flies are buzzing. A Greek man. She can tell by his clothes. There is a hole in his back.
Miss Butland ran down the path and swept her up in her arms, carried her back to Cook, and there was a submarine to make her feel better: ice-cold water in a misted glass, and submerged in it, a spoon of thick grape jam to lick. It was going to be all right, everyone was saying. They told her that, and then Mama told Cook. But the train never whistled again, and then Cook went off into Smyrna and never came back. The next day she found out, from Aleko the groom, that the Greek soldiers had eaten Rosie. And then Papa took Miss Butland to the British Consulate when the Greek soldiers had left and the Turkish soldiers arrived. ‘She will be quite safe. They’ve put her on a battleship,’ he told them when he returned, looking ruffled, more out of sorts than she had ever seen him. But Cook won’t be safe, and nor will the other servants. No safer than Rosie. But she can’t think about Rosie. She has decided she will never think of her, ever again.
She can hear something else behind her, above her parents’ soft voices. A low growl, like thunder rolling behind Nymph Dagh, but so low and powerful that she can feel it in her insides. And now it is louder. The wind has shifted slightly: she feels the boat jump forward. The sail above her snaps and ropes creak against wood. Her eyes begin to sting. There is a terrifying smell: burning, but not the friendly smell of a bonfire or a kitchen fire.
The girl sits up. She wants Mama to send the smoke and the noise away, so she turns around and, though she knows she shouldn’t, she looks behind her. She sees her father, arms spread across the spokes of the wheel, the faint glimmer of his smart white captain’s cap. And there is Mama, beside him, wearing her shooting clothes, a scarf tied around her head. But behind her parents, something else. Where the lights of the city should be is dense blackness slashed open to reveal a pulsing wound, dirty orange-red, almost too bright to look at. It throbs. It roars. She opens her mouth to scream. Perhaps she does scream. As the light pulses she sees other boats all around them, each one filled with shadows, and from them comes a sound, a thin wail that rises and falls, made up of whispers and sobbing.
She calls out again, and this time Mama hears her. For a moment the girl is frightened, because she has been disobedient. She has looked back. But Mama leans and whispers something to Papa, and then she makes her way along the rail to where the girl is sitting, hugging her knees, on the damp rug. ‘My poor little bird,’ she says, gathering up her skirts and sitting down. She takes her daughter in her arms and pulls her close. The girl smells salty tweed and perfume, Coty powder. One of Mama’s fair ringlets has come loose and the girl winds it around her fingers and holds it against her face. ‘Are you frightened?’
‘Mmm hmm.’ The girl nods, letting the rough cloth scratch her forehead. It feels so ordinary; it feels like home. A little spark of bravery ignites inside her. ‘A little bit.’
‘Everything is going to be absolutely fine, my dearest one.’ Mama is speaking English, which is their special language; Papa talks to her in Greek, though his English is as perfect as Mama’s. So many languages at home: English, French and Turkish; Greek, of course. ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ The girl shakes her head. ‘To Athens. Isn’t that exciting? Papa is moving his shop there.’
‘Can you move a shop?’ The girl rubs her eyes, thinking. ‘What about the windows?’
Mama laughs and ruffles the girl’s hair. ‘He’s left the windows. But all the precious things, all the lovely things are on board with us. He’ll find another shop in Athens, and we’ll find another house.’
‘But what’s wrong with our house?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. But sometimes one has to do something … something new. And exciting! An adventure!’
‘An adventure?’ The girl sniffs. She takes her mother’s hand and, out of long habit, takes the big gold ring Mama always wears, the ring with the old ruby from India, and puts it gently between her teeth. This does feel like an adventure, all of a sudden, she thinks, catching the faint, lemony taste of the gold. She lifts her head and looks over the rail. They are sailing past big ships, all lit up in the night like ghostly ballrooms. There are lights high up in the distance, the little villages on the mountains that surround the bay. Suddenly there is a whirring of wings and a flock of cormorants shoots past the end of the bowsprit, black necks outstretched, wings beating frenziedly. Their eyes reflect the fire behind them, glowing like the gems in a garnet necklace she had watched Papa lay out for a customer the last time he had taken her to the shop, his business: G. Haggitiris et Cie, Goldsmiths. The most beautiful shop on Frank Street, where all the shops are beautiful. But now there will be a new shop, in Athens. ‘Do they have Xenopoulo in Athens?’ she asks Mama. Whenever Papa takes her to work with him, they always go to the department store, the most wonderful place she has ever been, and ride up and down on the escalators. Then they go to the Cafe Trieste, where she eats ice cream and listens to the singers. The singers, with their kohl-ringed eyes and languid movements and their sad, lovely songs. ‘Why are the songs so unhappy?’ she once asked Papa, and he laughed. ‘Well, my little empress, they are so very, very sad that they’ve gone all the way around again and become happy. Can’t you feel it, here?’ And he put his finger, very gently, over her heart.
‘I’m sure they have somewhere like Xenopoulo. It’s a very lovely city,’ Mama is saying. She takes a deep breath and the girl senses that she is not quite sure. ‘We shall buy a house in … I don’t know, perhaps Kolonaki. And then I am going to take you to Paris, and London. My goodness! What fun we’re going to have!’ Mama’s voice sounds as if she is making a face, though she is still smiling in the dirty red light, staring back towards Papa at the wheel. The girl wonders if the garnet necklace – the woman hadn’t bought it – is somewhere on Thetis, in one of the big, heavy boxes the men on the dock at Cordelio had carried on board. They had been angry, and Papa had given them a lot of money before they had done what he asked. There are so many boxes – from the shop and from the house – that the cabin is full. But it makes her feel safer to know that all those precious things are here with her. She looks back at Papa and waves. He grins and sweeps off his neat white cap and waves it at her. She laughs, delighted, but then the line of glowing red in the distance pulses and she snuggles closer to Mama.
‘It looks like a monster,’ she says. ‘Maybe a giant … a giant’s mouth.’
‘Then don’t look, dearest. Go to sleep. And when you wake up, there won’t be any giant.’
‘Papa? When will we get there?’ the girl calls out, her voice muffled by the thick air. But he grins and pats the varnished wheel.
‘We’ll be in Piraeus in time for tea, little Zoë. I promise.’
The yacht slides on. Long before dawn, she is still awake, shivering under a blanket, when she hears a voice: a woman, crying. Then the soft plash of oars, far away through the drifting smoke. The voice comes a little closer and the girl hears that it isn’t sobbing but singing. She stares out towards the sound but there is nothing to be seen. Just the voice, and its song.
A person must give some thought to the hour of his death;
when he will go down into the black earth
and his name will be erased.
The girl opens her eyes to a faintly glowing whiteness: milky, suffused with pink and orange, like the opal brooch Papa had once let her wear to the Cafe Trieste. When she breathes in, the air is clean, damp and salty. The thick, dirty stench from last night has all gone. Above her, the sails are hanging almost empty. Mama is sitting next to her on the rug, winding a bright silk scarf, yellow roses on a field of black and red, around the crown of her broad-brimmed hat. ‘What do you think?’ she asks as she puts on the hat, pins it into place and ties the ends of the scarf under her chin with a flouncy bow.
‘I like that one,’ says the girl, nodding. ‘Mama, where has the sea gone?’
‘It’s just mist, darling. It will blow away soon. And the sun is rising. Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘Where are we?’
‘I don’t quite know,’ Mama says. She stands up and brushes down her tweed skirt. ‘Somewhere near Andros, I think. I shall go and ask Papa.’
‘And ask him about Athens,’ the girl says. She reaches out for Mama but her fingers only catch a tiny fold of cloth and it twitches out of her grasp. ‘Do they have singers there? Do they have ice cream?’
‘Of course they have ice cream, koukla!’ Mama makes her way around the cabin to where Papa stands behind the wheel. He hasn’t moved at all while I’ve been asleep, she thinks. Morning seems to have sent away the horrors of last night. The soft mist that surrounds them muffles their voices and makes Thetis seem like a funny sort of long, whitewashed room. Dew shines on polished brass and varnished wood. The girl yawns loudly and stretches. She sees Mama lean against Papa and put her arm around his waist. Beyond the rail, there is a narrow strip of water, as slick and shimmery as blue glass, across which Thetis is moving so slowly that she is barely leaving a wake, and then white mist, a soft, undulating wall. She hears the clink of china, the sound deadened by the mist. Mama is coming back towards her, edging along the narrow walkway between the cabin and the rail. She is carrying a pink plate. On the plate is a white napkin, folded crisply into a square, and on the cloth rests a piece of sweet milk pudding. The girl sees it all with perfect clarity: the knife-sharp corners of the napkin, the pale yellow custard held between two layers of brown, crisp pastry.
‘Breakfast!’ Mama calls.
‘Mary?’ There is something sharp in Papa’s voice. He is looking over his left shoulder, staring intently into the mist. ‘Can you hear something?’
‘What, darling?’
‘There.’ Papa pushes his cap back on his head and frowns. ‘There! Engines!’
‘I don’t … Yes, yes, there is something!’
As Mama says the words, the girl hears it: a low thrum, a deep pulse inside the glowing mist. ‘Too near,’ Papa says. He stoops behind the binnacle, and when he stands up again he is holding something that the girl has never seen before: a large black pistol. The pulse has suddenly become much louder. The girl thinks of the sound she heard last night: the roar of the monster.
‘George …’ Mama says. Papa thrusts his arm into the air and there is a deafening bang. The girl sees smoke, and another flash, and then the bang comes again. Mama is still holding the plate and as Papa fires again and shouts at the top of his voice, the girl is staring at the square of milk pudding so she only sees, out of the corner of her eye, a shape, an angle with no top and no bottom, black and sharp, slicing through the opal glow of the mist. She opens her mouth and then she is looking at a black wall that hisses as it moves effortlessly through the wood and brass and canvas of Thetis. She has just enough time to realise that Mama and Papa are on the other side of the wall when the yacht seems to tumble. Green water, no longer glassy but roiling and lacy with foam, is above her, all around her. There is water in her eyes, in her mouth, freezing, stifling. A deafening throb beats at her ears. It’s the monster, she thinks. It found us after all.
She is rolling, weightless one moment, heavy as a stone the next. Through the sizzle of panic she can see her arms stretched out in front of her, hands clawing at nothing. They look colourless, dead. She can’t feel them, though her head is bursting. She needs to breathe: the pain in her chest is worse than anything she has ever known. If she opens her mouth, the pain will go away. If she opens her mouth … She is sinking, through strings of bubbles and bright things whirling past her. A porthole from the cabin glides by, going down. She reaches, reaches. And then something touches her hand. A yellow rose. She clutches at it in a frenzy, sinking her hand into red silk and undulating flowers, and as she does so something takes hold of her. She is no longer falling, but rising up, towards gauzy light. She sees a hand clutching the front of her sailor suit, and on one finger, surely, a gold ring with a blood-red stone. Everything has become still and calm. The girl reaches for the hand, because the only thing she wants to do, the only thing left to do, is to put the ring between her teeth, taste the sour gold and the sweetness of her mother’s skin, sweet as love itself.
What her fingers find is something hard and slippery, and though she doesn’t want to, she grabs on with all her might and lets herself be carried, faster and faster, up towards the light, to where she doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave, now. She wants to stay down there, to take the hand and let it take her home. But instead she is thrown into the air. She gasps, retches, breathes. The thing she is clutching is a long piece of smooth, varnished wood: part of a mast. She watches her hands scrabble like small, white creatures. They can’t be hers. Then she sees, just beyond her fingers, a piece of filmy cloth. A ripple catches it, and the girl sees a yellow rose and a swirl of red, but it is already blackening in the water, fluttering out of sight like a drowning butterfly.
She screams. One word: Mama. The mist takes her little voice and smothers it like a wet pillow pressed across her face. But she fights it. Panic makes her fight. She screams because of the hand that had pushed her up towards the shifting roof of the sea. She screams at her own hands, alien as crabs, that grip the slippery wood with a strength she doesn’t understand. She screams again, and again, at the empty sea.
Time must pass, because the mist melts into the sea and the sun rises to show the girl that she is a speck on a vast mirror. The light flashes off the water and blinds her. The sun burns a line into her scalp while the water turns her legs numb. She screams until she can taste blood in her mouth. When she closes her eyes she sees the plate, the napkin and the square of pie, Mama’s hand with its ring curved around the white china. She can’t really think but if she has a thought, it is that the world can’t end as long as she keeps calling for Mama, that she can’t be lost as long as Mama can hear her voice. Because Mama can hear her. Mama and Papa are somewhere behind the flash and shear of sunlight, waiting for her.
When the ship rises up out of the orange morning light, the girl has long since screamed herself into silence. It appears behind her, a low cliff of white paint streaked with rust. She looks up to see faces, more than she can count, an endless line of noses and eyes and mouths, blinking and wailing like seagulls. A white circle floats towards her, hitting the water and splashing her so that she almost lets go of the wood. ‘Lifebelt!’ someone shouts, and she flails herself into it. A couple of sailors haul her up and pull her out of the lifebelt as casually as if they are shucking an oyster. No one speaks to her and she is shaking too hard, and her throat is too raw, to say anything herself. After the sailors dry her off they ask her some half-hearted questions. She can’t answer. Are my mama and papa here? she wants to ask, but something tells her that if she asks, the world will end. So they just push her into the packed mass of people which fill every inch of space on the boat, and she ends up trapped against the railing, a fat woman’s legs pressing her hard into the sharp edges of the blistered paint. She is grateful, at first, for the warmth of the woman’s doughy body. She can’t think of anything except how cold she is: when she tries, her thoughts have no reality. Her mind drifts, febrile and raw, through an endless series of pictures flicking like a picture book in a breeze. Mama, smiling. Papa’s hat. The pistol. A rose, sinking into darkness. Above her, the woman keeps up a whining litany of prayers for hours, muttering at the Holy Virgin as if she hopes that the Theotokos will give in out of sheer boredom. The endless wheedling voice, the throb of the engines, the groans, screams and prayers of the crowd fill air already thick with bad smells: smoke, oil, sweat, stale perfume, an overflowing lavatory. And all the time, the girl is forced to stare out at the sea, blue-green and calm. ‘I’m going to see Mama and Papa,’ she starts to whisper, in time to the fat woman’s prayers. ‘They’re waiting for me.’ And she tries to believe it, though she is too frightened to make that part of her do what she wants it to do: to make her feel like she does when she prays in church, or to the icon at home: that warm certainty that invisible things will help her. ‘My every hope I place in you, Mother of God; keep me under your protection,’ the woman mutters, but the girl can feel her flesh trembling through her damp skirt, and she knows that the words aren’t helping the woman either.
The boat stops, once, at a tiny port, just a stone jetty flung out into the sea from a featureless brown island. The jetty is seething with people. The woman shifts, and more people crowd in on either side of the girl, trapping her arms at her sides. She has almost no strength after gripping the bowsprit in the freezing cold, and though she struggles as hard as she can, she can’t free them. She starts to cry, but no one notices. Her sobs are lost in the ceaseless babble of voices speaking Greek, Armenian, Turkish, Ladino. Desperate for the lavatory, as Mama had always insisted she call it, she stands in agony until her body takes over and a warm gush runs down her legs. Still, no one notices. Then they are among other ships, and she finds herself looking for Thetis among the masts, which makes her cry again. Islands pass by, and more ships, all of them as crowded as hers. Then they pass beneath some sort of cliff, a looming shadow, and the girl, who can only lift her head, looks up to see the prow of a gigantic ship, stark black, striped with white and painted with letters bigger than her: NARKUNDA. And high up, a little white figure … He catches her eye, even though the huge ship’s rail is lined with nice-looking people, well dressed, well fed. Why? What has she seen? The bright white of his sailor suit? The flash of something shiny in his hands? She can just about tell that he is a boy, a little boy. Then he looks down, and sees their boat. Light flashes on glass around his face. And then he raises his hand. Is he waving at her? She wants so badly to wave back. It is her world, up there: clean clothes, light glinting off varnished wood and polished brass. Perhaps Mama and Papa … The big ship could have picked them up, couldn’t it? That was where they belong. It had just been a mistake that this rusty old boat had found her before they had. These thoughts, vague and desperate, make her whimper. She tries to raise her arm, but it only moves enough for the sharp edges of the paint to cut into her. So she has to watch the great ship glide past as the tears stream down her face, the woman behind her still muttering fretfully at the Virgin. When she can’t turn her head far enough to keep the boy in sight, she turns it the other way, and sees the harbour.
CHAPTER TWO
Every evening, Tommy Collyer walks, hand clasped tightly in his mother’s, along the varnished walkways of the ocean liner until they are facing the dense, vivid striations of the tropical sunset. They have left the monsoon behind them in Bombay but every night the clouds stack themselves above the horizon like slatted blinds. His mother has a box of paints in her cabin, a heavy wooden case with a red NEEDED ON VOYAGE label pasted onto it. Every day he begs her to open it, and every day, after a ritual set of objections from her, which he finds intensely pleasing, she clicks open the catches and shows him the contents. The brushes, the porcelain palette, the water flask. But what he wants to see are the paints. The little lozenges of colour, silky-shiny like sweets, each with a dip worn into it, some more worn than others. He runs his fingers gently across the rows of pigment; secretly he wants to eat them, because they are so unbearably pretty, or squeeze them like rubber tree sap between his fingers. They intoxicate him, like the rich headache fumes of petrol, or the leafy perfume of his father’s cigars.
‘My Indian colours,’ his mother calls them, and sometimes mutters about having to change them when they get home, which makes no sense to him. Why change these lovely colours? And isn’t home the place they are leaving behind? Gamboge, cadmium yellow deep, cadmium orange, scarlet lake, rose doreé, permanent carmine, cerulean blue, viridian, Hooker’s green, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, Indian red. These are the colours of the vast monsoon sunsets. His mother, on their first evening at sea, had brought out her paints and her easel and set to work while he watched over her shoulder, Daddy being somewhere else – Daddy is always somewhere else. She had made thick stripes of blue, purple, violet, red and orange, and blurred each into the other with a watery brush, which he had thought quite splendid but which Mummy herself did not seem to care for.
‘And now it’s gone,’ she had said, with a touch of irritation, as if sunsets were just one more thing that could not be trusted. It was the voice she usually reserves for remarks about Daddy, in fact. Tom had recognised it immediately.
They are heading for England, the place Mummy and Daddy call home. It doesn’t seem possible to Tom, as he plays on the decks and walkways of SS Narkunda, that a little more than a week ago he had been playing on the verandah of the bungalow in Koovappally, watching bird-wing butterflies drift past like living kites in the muggy, spicy monsoon air. Looking down the hill at the dark lines of rubber trees, at the pepper vines swarming over the telephone poles. At his ayah, Malini, drifting past the ferns by the well, trailing her white sari like a ghost. Waking in the morning to church bells and the call of the muezzin rising up from the valley. That was home. Daddy, and the other white people in Koovappally and Kanjirappally and Ernakulam, spent a lot of time talking about England, as if India was nothing more than a big, dirty house they were visiting. But I was born here, Tom would think, listening to them.
‘What’s England like?’ he asks Mummy, when they are back in their cabin, getting ready for supper. He is standing on Mummy’s bed, doing up the buttons on the back of her ballgown. It must be the hundredth time he’s asked, but Mummy leans her head patiently and smiles at him in the cheval glass.
‘It rains quite a lot,’ she says.
‘It rains a lot in Kerala,’ Tom points out.
‘True. Let me see … It’s very green.’
‘Koovappally is green.’
‘Different green. All different sorts.’
‘Viridian?’ asks Tom, tapping the paint box.
‘Not … not very often,’ Mummy concedes.
‘Well then. What colours would you use to paint England?’
Mummy furrows her brow. ‘Let me think,’ she says. ‘Hmm. All the colours I took out of my set when I came to India …’ She clicks open the box and looks at the blocks of pigment. Underneath the white china palette she finds a folded square of printed paper, which she squints at. ‘Here we are. Sepia. Vandyke brown. Payne’s grey. Caput mortuum. Windsor green. Terre vert. Olive green. I told you: lots of greens.’
‘And grey. They sound like ugly colours,’ Tom says, frowning.
‘No, no. They’re lovely. They’re … just different. There’s no such thing as an ugly colour, I don’t think!’
There is a brisk knock, and the door opens to reveal Daddy, in immaculate white tie.
‘Shall we go down, Evelyn?’ he asks.
‘One minute, Jim.’ Mummy wets a comb and runs it through Tom’s hair. She adjusts the collar of his sailor suit and pats his head. ‘There.’
‘Captain Collyer, Mrs Collyer.’ The steward greets them at the door to the dining room, ignoring Tom, who expects to be ignored. They are seated next to Mr and Mrs Forde, Major Rowland, the Reverend and Mrs Woodleigh, as usual. There have been four of these suppers so far, and Tom, who is neither spoken to nor expected to speak, has become minutely acquainted with the details of his fellow diners’ faces, their clothing and hands. Reverend Woodleigh has long, pale, smooth hands on which the heavy dark yellow staining – yellow ochre, Tom decides – from his cigarettes stands out like a wound. His wife’s ears have unusually long lobes. Major Rowland’s moustache partly hides a white scar. Mr Forde has a tic in one eye and a sharp, bobbing Adam’s apple. Tom goes to work on his plate of fish – bony and trapped in a claggy, cheesy sauce – and listens to the grown-ups talk. Reverend Woodleigh has just finished describing, for the third time, his work at a mission for unmarried ladies at Sangor. Mummy and Mrs Forde are discussing bridge. His father is telling Major Rowland about his time in the War. Tom knows about the War from five years of tea parties, of drinks on the verandah, of polo games. He also knows about polo, duck shooting in the Punjab, and pigsticking. He picks a bone out of his fish, and half listens to his father’s clipped voice.
‘Came out to India straight after Sandhurst, in ’10, Major. Stationed in Secunderabad – yes, that’s the one: N Battery. We were in France by the end of ’14. Caught some shrapnel at Loos. That was a business … You were there, of course. I got a Blighty one at La Boisselle. Wanted to go back to the front, but my lords and masters sent me to W Battery instead – India again. We were supposed to be sent to the Middle East but nothing came of it in the end. Meanwhile, I met my dear wife while on leave in Mussoorie; I rather think that I owe my good fortune to the shortage of eligible men in the hill stations that year, rather than my charms …’
‘Nonsense, darling,’ Tom’s mother puts in, automatically, and the major chuckles obligingly.
‘And then to Kerala,’ the major says, blotting claret out of his moustache with his napkin.
‘Yes. Evelyn’s uncle plants rubber down there. After the Armistice I went on the Reserve List, you know … at loose ends. Thought I’d try my hand.’
‘Now, you see, I’m curious,’ says the major, leaning forward. Tom sees more scars on his neck, white lines radiating from the shadows under his collar. The two men fall into a heavy discussion of the economics of the rubber trade. Tom doesn’t understand the word economics but he knows what rubber is. Daddy seems to be telling Major Rowland a kind of story about why they have left India: Mummy is homesick, it seems, and the climate does not agree with her. Or with Tom, apparently. There is an important job waiting for Daddy, though this is the first Tom has heard of it. Mummy loves the weather in Kerala, he wants to say. And there’s nothing wrong with my lungs. My lungs are fine. And the colours. What about the colours? But of course he doesn’t say anything. He just keeps chewing on the gluey white sauce. Daddy’s story is funny, he thinks, but it isn’t the one he has learnt off by heart over the past year. That story, as it runs through his head, is like a book for very little children, full of big, crude pictures painted by Daddy’s yelling. The trees. The markets. Tom can see him pacing up and down in the sitting room, a big glass of whisky-soda in his hand. The bloody workers. Your bloody father, Evelyn, and his bloody nagging. I know he lent me money, Evelyn! I bloody know that! Well, he’s got enough of the bloody stuff, hasn’t he? And why shouldn’t I play a few games of polo? Anyway, doesn’t your father like a flutter? A flutter is betting, Tom knows, though he doesn’t really understand what betting is. Something Daddy does a lot. Too much, even. And his grandfather, Major General Heywood – Da – doesn’t seem like the sort of person who flutters. Not at all. Da, tall, thick round the middle, with a bulbous nose and swirling grey moustaches, is the only grown-up, apart from Mummy, who has ever looked Tom straight in the eyes and listened to him. Well, that isn’t quite true. Malini had listened. The gardener, the cook … All his Indian friends had listened. Are there Indians, he wonders, in England? He very much hopes that there are. Because if there aren’t any kind, patient Indians, who is going to listen to him?
A few days later, they pass through the Suez Canal. Flat desert on either side, pale brown like the fur of a dead deer he had found one day in Mussoorie. Raw Umber. Raw Sienna. The huge liner dwarfs the flocks of little boats with sharp, triangular sails that dart around the Narkunda as it inches along the strange, dead-straight waterway, passing other big ships: rusty cargo vessels flying flags he has never seen before; coal ships; an Italian cruiser, which has all the Narkunda’s passengers lined up along the rails, ooh-ing and aah-ing and waving at the smart Italian sailors. Another ocean liner glides by, and Tom feels a stab of raw envy: the people on its decks are going to India.
They put in at Port Said. Mummy and Daddy go ashore, but Tom is left on board with the Woodleighs, and has to listen to Mrs Woodleigh muttering darkly to her husband about women – whom she may or may not actually know – doing things she doesn’t approve of while the two of them drink tea and forget to offer him so much as a biscuit. He desperately wants to lean over the rail and listen to all the noise of Egypt, smell all the smells, watch the orange sellers and the luggage carriers and the beggars and soldiers. But instead he sits stiffly beside Mrs Woodleigh, trapped in a cloud of lavender water and the starchy tang of moral superiority. Mummy comes back alone, reporting that Daddy has bumped into someone he knows from the War. The sigh and slight shake of her head with which she relates this is familiar to Tom. But at least she has brought him some presents: a funny cut-out figure of a fat man in a fez; and a toy, four wooden camels on a wooden paddle, that nod their heads if you pull on a piece of dangling string. He is entranced, and thinks about nothing else for the rest of the day. When he wakes up the next morning, they are at sea again. Daddy eats his breakfast kedgeree in frowning silence. His face is red and puffy, and Mummy narrows her eyes whenever she has occasion to glance at him.
Major Rowland, who is revealing himself as something of a gossip, comes over to tell them that they have someone important on board. An American consul, apparently. The Narkunda is making a slight detour, to Piraeus, on this American’s account. ‘Hitching a ride,’ says the major, twitching his eyebrows, perhaps with disapproval, perhaps with admiration. ‘Americans …’
The breakfast party murmur and shake their heads. It is something to do with an awful happening in Smyrna, Tom hears, though where Smyrna might be is not explained.
Mrs Woodleigh is very upset at what she calls outrages. Mr Forde remembers a visit before the War – ‘Motor cars and department stores, just like Oxford Street,’ he says. All burnt, now. Nothing left at all.
‘Poor bloody Greeks,’ says the major, ordering himself another poached egg on toast, with anchovies.
The Narkunda sails between low, brown islands. Further off, a golden-brown land spreads mountainous arms wide to receive them. White villages tumble like sugar cubes towards the bluest water Tom has ever seen. In the distance, a bay full of ships, and further off, a hill crowned with a broken cage of white stone. The major lets Tom, who is standing on a chair, peer at Athens through his field glasses. ‘Piraeus over here, Athens over there,’ the major explains. ‘You’ll be learning about it in school soon, old chap. Aristotle and all that.’ The broken cage is something called the Parthenon. Very, very old, and terribly important. The field glasses are heavy and Tom lets them droop down towards the harbour, Piraeus, which has come much closer. Inside the figure-of-eight of his vision, a screen of masts and funnels, and behind that, a quayside swarming with people. Surely those can’t be tents? A big flag, a red cross on white ground. Smoke is rising from cooking fires. It looks a bit like India to Tom, but India had never seemed broken. Chaotic, yes, sometimes scary. But India was always getting on with itself. This harbour, these people … Something is wrong here.
A motor launch comes alongside, a tall man in a white suit climbs down into it and is taken away to Piraeus. As Tom is staring after it, another ship chugs across the Narkunda’s bows. Wide and low in the water, it is trailing black smoke from its funnel, which drifts into Tom’s face, almost choking him with its carbolic reek. As he rubs his eyes, he looks down and sees that the decks of the ship are crammed with people. They are packed together, grown-ups and children, most standing, some sitting among a chaos of suitcases, bags and bundles, some just lying on the deck, crowded by the feet of the others. They are all dirty, all exhausted. Mostly women and children. Some of the women are wearing bright, modern clothes, but all stained and filthy; others are swathed in black like the nuns from the monastery in Kanjirappally, their faces all but hidden by scarves. Tom looks down in amazement. Faces turn up to him, blank, or pleading. Angry, perhaps, some of them. A woman is suckling her baby. When she looks up at the great bow of the Narkunda, her face is streaked with soot and tears.
As the ship slips by, Tom sees a little girl in a sailor suit just like his. She is crushed up against the rail by the crowd, so small that she is almost swallowed by the skirts of a large woman who is clinging to a stick-thin man in a dented bowler hat. Her long, wavy blonde hair is plastered across her face, which is disgracefully dirty. If those people are her parents, Tom thinks, they jolly well ought to take care of her. How unfair. And because fairness is something Tom understands, something he has been taught to believe in, and because the girl is around his age and looks so unhappy, he lifts his arm and waves. She sees him; she lifts her streaked face and her eyes meet his. Then he sees that she can’t wave back; her arms are trapped against the painted iron of the ship’s railings. She is trapped. He heaves the field glasses up to his eyes and fiddles desperately with the focus wheel. Sweeping the glasses clumsily from side to side, he finds the boat. There are people crammed onto the decks, clinging to funnels, masts, rigging. The boats on the river at Cochin are crowded, but he has never seen anything like this. With a huge effort he keeps the glasses still enough to find the fat woman, and in front of her, pushed so hard against the rail that it seems to be cutting her in two, is the little girl in the sailor suit. Her arms are by her sides, caught between the rail and the people pushing in around her. With a little stab of something he can’t identify – fear? Wonder? – he sees she is looking straight at him. He has time to see that her eyes might be green, and that she has been crying, when the ship clears the Narkunda’s bow and is gone, swallowed by bristling masts and funnels of the harbour. Tom cranes his neck after her and tries to find the ship again with the wavering field glasses, but it is useless.
Lowering the field glasses carefully, he finds that his heart is beating very fast. The poor girl. He feels a little bit ashamed of himself for not noticing that she was so unhappy. He hopes he hasn’t made her feel worse. What had she been doing there? And all those crowded, frightened people? They might have been ghosts. He might have seen a ghost ship, it had slipped by so silently. He’ll ask his mother, he tells himself, but then the Narkunda’s steam whistle begins to shriek and the houses and hills start to swing around in front of his eyes. He goes to find his parents, but the memory of what he has seen lingers in an uncomfortable way and he decides not to say anything about it. Perhaps they’ll think he made it up. Perhaps they’ll tell him he shouldn’t have waved at all those dirty people.
‘The captain has told us we can go ashore!’ At tea, Mummy is the happiest that Tom has seen her since they left Bombay. He gathers that the Narkunda is stopping here until tomorrow evening – something administrative, says Major Rowland, and the grown-ups all roll their eyes knowingly. ‘The Parthenon, Jim! We’ll go, of course!’
‘Can’t say I fancy it much,’ says Daddy, cocking his head jovially towards the reverend and his wife, who chuckle in agreement. ‘Seems rather a mess. Frightful mob on the waterfront.’
‘Quite a picture,’ Mrs Woodleigh agrees primly.
‘They are refugees,’ says Mummy, her voice sounding pained. ‘Not a mob. One can’t imagine what they must have been through.’
‘Never had much time for the Classics. Frightfully dull,’ Daddy states blandly, ignoring her.
‘Well, I shall go.’ Mummy sits back, glaring at Daddy. ‘And Tommy shall come with me.’
‘Tommy?’ Daddy laughs, not all that kindly.
‘Yes. Why not? It will be good for him.’
‘I don’t see—’
But the major interrupts, surprisingly deftly. ‘I rather like the idea, myself. If you’d care for an old man’s company, I’d be happy to tag along with you and this young chap.’
‘That would be wonderful, Major.’ Mummy beams at him gratefully.
That seems to settle it, though Mummy and Daddy do not talk very much that evening, and the next morning, Daddy chews his breakfast kedgeree angrily, moustache twitching, eyes fixed on Tommy’s smart tropical-weight blazer, which is getting a little small.
‘You’ll never wear that again,’ he says. ‘I’ll buy you some proper clothes as soon as we get home. Tweed.’
‘What’s tweed, Daddy?’ It is often dangerous to talk to Daddy when he is in one of these moods, but a new word is always interesting to Tommy. Mummy and Daddy lock eyes and Tommy’s stomach clenches but, fortunately, Major Rowland chooses that moment to enter the dining room. He smiles at Tommy and raises a hand in greeting, and Tommy, wilting with relief at a quarrel averted, waves back. Mummy gives Daddy a tight little grin and stands up.
‘Come along, Tommy,’ she says pointedly. ‘We’re going to have such fun.’ Daddy dismisses them with a wave of his fork. ‘Honestly,’ Mummy says under her breath.
The Narkunda is anchored a little way from the quayside. The first thing Tommy notices when he steps out onto the deck, following his mother and the major to where a smartly dressed ship’s officer is waiting by a gate in the rail, is the noise. A shout, an endless shout made up of countless individual shouts: that is what it sounds like, noise so harsh and dense that Tommy almost lets go of his mother’s hand, tries to let go and get away, but she is holding on to him tightly, wincing at the noise and at the stench, an equally dense miasma of smoke, cooking, unwashed human beings and their waste. Tommy, though he is used to the smells of India, coughs and pulls on Mummy’s arm, but she just shakes her head.
‘Oh, those poor people,’ she mutters, and bends down to ruffle his hair. ‘Don’t worry, Tomtom. We shan’t be going near them. We’re off to see the Acropolis.’ Tommy notices that the holiday jollity of her words is not quite sincere, but he steels himself and follows her over to the rail. It is a short ride to the quayside. The boatmen, genially savage-looking men with thick dark hair and bristling moustaches, make for a clear section of the waterfront near a gaudy domed church, but as they begin to guide the launch in, a small tug boat, belching black smoke, nips in ahead of them. There is much guttural cursing as they try to put in further along, only to be waved away by an angry harbour official. When they finally tie the launch up, it is to a bollard only a few yards from the rough planking barricades that are containing the throng of refugees.
Tommy doesn’t want to get out of the boat. He looks over the side at the water, glinting with rainbow swirls of oil. Further down, a cloud of tiny silver fish moves back and forth. It must be silent down there. The roar of voices coming from the refugees is frightening. He hangs back, but Mummy still has a firm grip on his hand and before he knows it he is half climbing, half being hauled up onto the quayside. The major is standing, jaw set, pointing to where a line of horse-drawn carriages are waiting in the shade of some palm trees.
‘Over there, Mrs Collyer. Those are cabs, I think.’
Mummy follows the major across the wide expanse of pavement and tram rails, Mummy pulling Tommy, who shuffles along unwillingly, as only he seems to have noticed what is streaming towards them along the quay: a straggling column of people, mostly women and children with a few old men, being herded by a few soldiers in dusty uniforms and one single nurse in a blindingly white uniform. Tommy has time to note her starched wimple with its red cross in the centre and her steel-rimmed spectacles before the column reaches them and they are swamped. Instantly, Tommy is caught by the dragging black skirts of two women walking almost shoulder to shoulder. He trips, and feels his fingers being dragged out of his mother’s grasp. Squeezed between hips and thighs, he staggers in this new direction, terrified in case he falls and is trampled. He looks up and sees red faces framed by black headscarves, dirty hands gripping a baby, a bundle of rags. He catches his breath, and the air is full of sweat, mustiness, onions and, very faint, cinnamon. And words, incomprehensible, soft and hard at the same time, nothing like Malayalam or Hindi or English, the only languages he has ever heard. He trips, catches hold of rough cloth, rights himself. Someone treads, hard, on one of his sandal-clad feet. The women lurch to one side and come to a sudden, complaining halt. Tommy claws his way out from inside the quivering forest of skirts and legs and looks around, frantically, for his mother, but all he sees are dark, dusty people towering around him. To his horror, he finds he is behind the wooden barricade. There, looming not very far away in the harbour, is the huge bulk of the Narkunda. But here … He whimpers and thumbs hot tears from his eyes.
He tries to push through the crowd, but no one moves to let him through, no one even seems to notice him. The smells, the strange language, rising and falling in raw cadences of grief, frustration and despair, are overwhelming him. Turning, trying to prise people apart – is he blubbing? He must be – he becomes aware of another sound, not loud, in fact rather weak and thin, but … Someone is singing. Here, in this nightmare. It sounds like a child. Something makes him turn away from the wall of people and shove his way through more legs towards the voice. Perhaps it is because the singer sounds as small and lost as he feels at that moment. He elbows between an old man’s filthy pinstripe trousers and a woman’s once-bright calico skirt and has to catch himself, because he is right at the edge of the quay. A narrow strip of dirty marble is all that separates him from that greasy, rainbow water. But he can still hear the singing, and there, sitting beside an iron bollard with her legs dangling, is a little girl. She has tangled, dark gold hair and the torn and stained clothes she is wearing had once been a sailor suit very much like his own. Face turned towards the open sea, where tawny brown islands are shimmering in the heat haze, she is singing to nobody. Her voice hovers and twists like the murmurations of silver fish that flash deep beneath her dirty bare feet, and pulls him through the crowd until he is looking down at the matted cords of her blonde hair and the blue collar of the creased and grimy sailor suit. With a shock, he recognises her.
‘You were on that boat,’ he says, standing over her. ‘With all those people. I waved at you!’
She turns at his words and raises her face to his. It is sunburnt and dirty: she has cried, and rubbed her cheeks, cried again, until her skin is a hundred shades of dingy brown. She is staring at him so intently that her eyes seem brighter than the dazzling sunshine. They are a clear, mossy green, and Tom’s mind immediately runs across the pigments in his mother’s paintbox. Sap Green, he thinks. ‘Hello!’ he says again. His heart is thumping.
‘Hello,’ she says, in perfect English, though her voice is all scratchy. ‘I have lost my mama and my papa. Have they sent you to get me?’ She is trembling, Tommy notices, but she can’t be cold. The seafront is boiling hot. And she is staring at him with those eyes.
‘I don’t know …’ he stammers, but what he is thinking is that she is British. How utterly amazing! That means he’ll be safe. And it must be – of course – why he had picked her out among all those other people. ‘I just heard you singing.’ The girl gives him one more desperate glare and bursts into tears. But Tom is too overcome with relief and surprise – she is English, so that means he is safe – that he doesn’t notice. He squats down next to her. ‘What’s your name? What were you singing?’
The girl buries her face in her hands. Her shoulders are heaving. Tom has no brothers and sisters; his playmates have been the children of his parents’ Indian servants, who would never dream of crying in front of a little sahib. To his distress, he finds he doesn’t know what to do.
‘I bet you’ll find them in no time,’ he says briskly. ‘What’s your name? Mine’s Tommy. Tommy Collyer. I’m from India.’
‘My name is Zoë Haggitiris,’ the girl mumbles hollowly through her cupped hands. She sniffs. Her shoulders are still quivering. ‘I live in …’ She lifts her head and swallows with a great effort. ‘I live at number 32 in the Street of the English Church … in Bournabat,’ she adds, frowning, as though he is an idiot for not knowing.
‘I’m from India,’ he repeats. ‘Is your house near here, then?’
‘India?’ She frowns, and the dirt around her eyes cracks into tiny lines. ‘Mama has a ring from India. Don’t you know where Bournabat is? It’s in Smyrna.’
‘Oh.’ Tom racks his brains. He’s sure he has heard the grown-ups mention that word. A faint memory surfaces. ‘Do you have lots of figs there, or something?’
The girl frowns. ‘Figs?’ But Tom, overcome with relief that she isn’t crying any more, rambles on.
‘Smyrna … Do they have giant butterflies in Smyrna? In Koovappally – that’s my home – they have butterflies as big as this!’ He spreads his hands.
‘Ooh.’ The girl’s eyes narrow, and Tom knows instantly that she is picturing the butterflies, the drifting, lazy beauty of them.
‘Transparent yellow.’ He is so happy to have cheered her up that he forgets he is speaking. ‘Indian yellow. Cadmium scarlet. French ultramarine.’
‘What are you saying?’ The girl is listening intently.
‘Oh!’ He has been running his fingers across the paintbox in his mind, chanting the name of each shiny square that he might use to paint a butterfly. ‘Colours,’ he says, a bit embarrassed. ‘Um … gold ochre …’
‘I saw a horrible red,’ the girl says, drawing her knees up under her chin. Her feet are bare and filthy. ‘The most horrible red. Like the mouth of a monster.’
‘Crikey.’ Tom closes his eyes and thinks, touches a cube of paint, reads its label. ‘Like alizarin crimson?’
To his horror the girl starts to cry again. Not just blubbing, though: her body looks like it is being bent and unbent by something he can’t see, and the air is going in and out of her mouth in great ragged gasps. ‘Oh, gosh, don’t,’ he says, helplessly.
‘It was smoky and dirty,’ she gasps. ‘The fire. All the people were burning up in it. But Papa was taking us to Athens and we were going to have ice cream … And now he’s gone! Mama’s gone!’
‘Maybe they’ve just gone to see the ice cream man,’ Tom decides. In a hot, smelly place like this, there’s bound to be someone selling ice cream.
‘I fell in the sea,’ the girl says, shaking her head. Her face is in her hands again. Her shoulders quiver. Please don’t blub
