Salonika burning, p.1
Salonika Burning, page 1
ABOUT THE BOOK
Greece, 1917. The great city of Salonika is engulfed by fire as all of Europe is ravaged by war.
Amid the destruction, there are those who have come to the frontlines to heal: surgeons, ambulance drivers, nurses, orderlies and other volunteers. Four of them—Stella, Olive, Grace and Stanley—are at the centre of Gail Jones’s extraordinary new novel, which takes its inspiration from the wartime experiences of Australians Miles Franklin and Olive King, and British painters Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In Jones’s imagination these four lives intertwine and change, each compelled by the desire to create something meaningful in the ruins of a broken world.
Immersive and gripping, Salonika Burning illuminates not only the devastation of war but also the vast social upheaval of the times. It shows Gail Jones to be at the height of her powers.
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
EPIGRAPH
CHAPTER BEGIN
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
COPYRIGHT PAGE
The house, our hair, everything close
and dear, even the air,
is burning! In our hands
(we had no warning
of this) the world is alive and dangerous.
David Malouf, ‘Ladybird’, Earth Hour (2014)
BY MIDNIGHT ALL was blaze and disintegration.
A group of soldiers standing on the hill watched with indecent pleasure. The wind locals called the Vardaris blasted from the north, puffed minarets into candles and monuments to blocks of gold. A whoosh of flame—shaped paisley in its exotic unfurling—caused some spontaneously, shamelessly, to exclaim and clap.
No one would have said it aloud: How strangely beautiful, a city burning.
But alarm, infant fear, the sufferings of others: these were no match for excitement at a safe distance and the view of roaring engulfment, the way flame hurtled at the sky, reached for new fuel, burst light on the polished marble of churches, synagogues and mosques. The markets were gone, and the luxury stores on Eleftherias Square. The French Quarter was destroyed, the Café Cristal, the Hotel Olympia, the town hall, the Athens Bank. The English post office on Frangon Street was a pile of hot rubble.
Among the first to burn were the Ottoman houses in the old town. Wooden balconies fell into laneways in splintering crashes; rooms held shape until the last second, in nests of amber light. Smoke and ash, detachment, they all made up the show. There was a villainous cracking sound, like the smash of a headstone with an axe, then sparks and black arising in thick, gusty blurts. Whoomph, another gone; and the sound entering your bones.
Look! A cat falling, its fur on fire, poor thing. Or was it a shred of something solid, moved by distortions of flame-light? The soldiers could not see a confirming detail, but the story was a good one, a doomed cat leaping or flung, burning in a ball as it fell.
Such a hot wind, and no rain for months. All felt it on their faces with the sweat and smut, knowing with sinking hearts that the weather was against them.
Some had escaped by water, pushing their vessels into the Gulf. How many had floated off into the darkness, squinting against the smoke as they watched embers fall in showers above their heads, wondering, every one of them, what might afterwards remain?
The wharf was still there, and the famous White Tower, but flames had leapt to moored boats that were now a sludge on black water. This too was one of the beauties, the ocean aglow with scattered light, and for all that was lost and char, there were the modest boats, the small fishing vessels of the poor, that slid their neat shapes away and carried their human cargo to safety.
Every now and then came an explosion: stored oil, possibly armaments.
The people of Salonika streamed from the centre, stumbling across rough flagstones. Under flicker, under shroud, they gathered their lives and left. Some hauled carpets; some carried mirrors or sewing machines. Their voices blew upwards in snatches, collective in their panic.
William T. Wood, of Putney, renowned for his paintings of English flowers, was appointed war artist for the Balkans in the First World War. He favoured pale pinks, yellows and mauves, and painted the ‘Great Fire’ of Salonika as he witnessed it from an observation balloon in August 1917. It was a morning-after scene, brightly calm, with a floaty view from the heavens. In his signature pastels, remote as a child’s dream and thinly decorative, he painted smoke wafting in floral cumulus above the stricken city. There were no visible human or animal figures. Testimony, he called it, proud of the composition and the palette, and smugly pleased to have painted a Big Event.
But this was the first night, and fire was still a surprise. Shapes were dark against carnival colours and the wind gave everything a quality of animation.
Those who viewed Wood’s painting later, in London, saw the pretty lies of art.
Former residents and soldiers said, No, it wasn’t like that.
Eventually, tired of the spectacle, the men of the Allied Army of the Orient and the British Salonika Force returned to their camp. None spoke a word now. What was the point? It was like the silence after dragging bodies from no-man’s-land back to the trenches. There was nothing to say. There was nothing to meet the huge moment. They returned by instinct to drear duty and mechanical movement, to their slower and heavier selves, listing with exhaustion and ready to fold inwards. Excitement left and in its place was a murky lugging of spirit. The men extinguished their fag ends and saved them in their pockets and the toes of their boots. The scale of importance shifted; to imagine a ciggie first thing and a hot mug of tea at dawn.
Feverish, unquiet, they slept on straw pallets, calling out, as soldiers do, or tossing and turning in dreamland, their allied heads full of malaria and foreign fire.
HER FACE WAS black and her eyes were smarting but something had lit inside her.
Olive was there with her ambulance lorry, helping the evacuation. Beneath towering smoke and falling ash she worked methodically, taking sixteen souls at a time, mostly the aged and the frail. Her vehicle could not enter the city centre, so she met civilians as they fled. They towed handcarts, whipped famished donkeys, loaded themselves with meagre treasures and small crying children, and all were alike in their generalised fear. Olive tended them and offered water, though it was in short supply. She poured a little into each mouth, then bundled those she could fit into her lorry. Some had a balm of oil wiped on their burns. They glowed with sore lustre but did not complain. Faces were upturned in appeal, eyes carried the glitter of the fire. They reeked of sweat and smoke, made sour with the dirty air.
To and fro Olive went, unrelieved, for twenty hours. By the end her hands could no longer hold the steering wheel. They were stiff as a corpse and clumsy as claws, and though she rubbed at her fingers, they did not open and clasp as they should. She leant against the long gearstick, forced the machine to shudder forward, felt her feet work at the clutch and plunge down on the resisting accelerator. All the power she’d once possessed, when she first began driving, was now this urging into darkness, pulling at the choke, forcing lorry-life into the mass of lazy metal around her. She could feel the wheels churning away, finding traction with the heavy load. In the rear-view mirror exhaust met the smoke of a dying city.
And when at last she stopped, back at the field of tents that composed the Scottish Women’s Hospital, she fell immediately asleep. It was voluptuous to sink at last, bone-tired and released, with no need to remove her boots or uniform. She fell into the stink of a burnt, irrecoverable world. There would be nothing for a while but pitch-black and smoke in her clothes and hair. But she was burning in her dream as a myth might burn. She was falling like Icarus, transformed into a story.
GRACE WAS A surgeon working with the Scottish Women’s Hospital. She moved slowly in the tent as she checked the dressings of an amputee. The soldier could not have been more than twenty, from Cardiff, someone said, David, someone said, when they heard him mumble in broken Welsh at the height of his delirium.
Yes, definitely Welsh. His face was bare and childish, his voice sounded clotted and strangled. The friend who had brought him in looked on with tender dismay—love, perhaps, men’s love—and whispered encouraging endearments, such as a mother might offer to a feverish babe.
The Welshman and his compatriot. We are representatives, Grace thought. War has made us both less and more than what we are. This man, his bandages bloody, his stumps poking towards her as if in accusation: legless but national, a child and a hero. If he made it home he would signify ‘war wounded’ and ‘unlucky bastard’ to those who watched as he begged, or dragged, or sat perched on a mobile thatched chair, perhaps bearing a placard at his chest that read ‘Balkans Service’.
She smelt the smoke of Salonika, blown across miles. Before night fell she saw a ridge of airborne ash, then in darkness a vermilion glow like a welt on the horizon. Already she’d heard the story of three cats, flung burning from a building by an old crone who refused to move. It seemed credible enough, to fling creatures away, to save pets when one was too worn-out to budge. One cat was a ball of fire, they said.
Later Grace would note the details in her diary: two cats saved, one lost, while an old woman perished in rising flames. A man called David who would certainly die that night. And an ancient city made ash; and yet more refugees on the way.
She readied herself for burnt bodies and no sleep. She thought: Antisepsis, bacteriostasis, debridement. In Fr
How variously men contrive to murder each other.
Grace organised morphine and checked the sterilisation of dressings. She superintended the preparation of iodine, brandy and paraffin wax. She stopped only for a cigarette, puffing with dull vacancy and lack of pleasure.
It was after midnight. Such a peaceful time, not yet hectic with arrivals of the newly burnt or wounded. Grace looked at David’s face, now still and silent, now closed into his dying. Courteously, like a servant, she pulled the blanket to his chin.
STELLA WORKED AS assistant cook in the hospital kitchen. This is what they gave to a writer volunteering, the most menial of jobs. So many potatoes to peel, and so little meat. Her fingers were blistered from opening cans of brownish meaty stuff, muck by another name. For the Australians working at the hospital, this was an insult to the spirit. She was sick of the giant pots that she stirred with a stick, and the smell of old cabbage and something grey and rancid. She was cranky and wanting more: amusement, mutton stew, a gramophone, new books. Her favourite task was distributing tobacco on Sundays. The patients were all so pathetically grateful. They reached up to her with pained smiles and skinny fingers, stretching beyond their ruined faces and bandaged limbs to accept her gift.
‘Sister!’ they called out, as if she too was a nurse and deserved respect.
But now she was sparked by the fire and its implausible magnitude. Afterwards, she heard that it burned for thirty-two hours. She heard how little the residents of Salonika wept, and how stoically they moved on. Seventy thousand people lost their homes. There would be a new tent city nearby, and more sent away on trains, to other cities and other tents, refugees at a time of ever more refugees. The hospital tents were already at capacity and she saw their triangular shapes in the moonlight. This was the condition of everything now, an impermanence of homes and borders, vanquished dreams, tough loss, living and dying beneath a thin, fluttery membrane of canvas.
It was hard not to think in these terms of historical summation. Hard not to see it all unending and too large to be solved. Not the Kaiser this time, not the Bulgar or the Fritz, but ordinary error and elemental destruction.
Later Stella heard that the Hagia Sophia remained intact, standing where it had stood, unburnt, from the early eighth century.
Irreligious, she was unsure why this news had so moved her.
STANLEY, A YOUNG artist, volunteered as a medical orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915. He’d done ten months in a hospital in Bristol, six weeks in Field Ambulance training, and now he was ready for action. He arrived at Salonika on the troopship Llandovery Castle, amused that a ship was named for a castle, considering the anomaly of rock and ocean, thinking of his four older brothers, already at the Front, and wondering if they knew that he was now on active service. Royal Berkshire Regiment.
A small man, with red ears, owlish spectacles and a nervy disposition, he was unsuited to soldiering but wished fervently for adventure. He was one of those who stood that first night watching the city burn, feeling rather ashamed of his pleasure, and confused by Salonika gleaming lovely before him, flashing its own demise.
As he watched, he thought about the citizens of the city and made his own stories. A family, how they would have smelt the smoke for hours, foolishly calm at first, rising from a late supper, then known at last that they must leave. Children at play in the street, stopping to gaze at the sky, then running inside, coughing and afraid. Or a lover, leaving a bed, washing away stickiness with water from a jug on the sideboard, seeing the orange glow at the window and realising that the blaze was beyond control.
Ah, the lovers. There would have been panic, and the man or woman in the bed would have rushed to retrieve clothes and hastily dress, so they could head together down crooked stairs and out onto the street, only half aware that this was the end of all that they cherished.
How he wished to paint it. The razed city. The human drama. He saw the old forms broken, shaped in new alignments, the destructible world abstracted in splendid innovations. He would paint the couple on the bed, made tired and saggy by their lovemaking, sprawled together in naked, ungainly relaxation; beyond them the orange window before they both saw and knew. Already he understood the power of derangement, and how a single window might contain an entire fate.
SOMETIMES SHE MISSED it: Sydney with its ferries and shops and checking the gin for afternoon tennis. The great harbour richly swelling, rendered scenic for the wealthy. The maid with a tray, her fanned cap perky, her sluttish habit of twirling her hair. It was always late afternoon, the air sleepy and awash in ochre light.
Olive was untying her tennis shoes when she decided she must leave. Her dress was adhesive with sweat, her face rosy with winning and flirtation, when she felt dissatisfaction move like a tremor through her body. She scarcely knew what it was, so accustomed to having all she needed. She saw her own narrow hand holding her gaping shoe and wondered what, if anything, she might do with her useless life.
She flapped at her collar to cool herself, lifted her damp hair from her sweltering neck and downed a gin and tonic, minus tinkling ice. But still the feeling remained. A useless life. A mere passing through. She’d read in books of such moments: an interception of self-knowledge that required a rapid change, a Victorian lady glimpsing the truth of her marriage in a gilded doorway, or of another’s deception, or of general iniquity; then swishing balloon skirts as she fled along Italianate halls. But this was the twentieth century, 1913, and Olive was entirely modern and heedless.
She banged her shoes together and shook them as if they contained sand. She looked across at the white sails leaning on the blue harbour, jiggling, aslant, pulled by wind towards the ocean. Beyond the cliffs lay the Pacific, beating its meaningless repetition.
Olive’s father, a widowed banker, had given her a pampered start. By both conviction and means he believed in excess in all things material. Even their potted ferns were too big, flourishing madly, and she would recall them with a mixture of nostalgia and revulsion. These ferns were her father’s hobby; he liked to stroke their long arms, snip at ailing fronds, squirt a little water and then fondle the soil to check the quality of damp. Daily he performed this task, with dozens of indoor ferns. The rooms of their house were dank green, the affectation one of jungle. The rich, Olive learned early, are permitted cheery eccentricity; ordinary people must suffer cheerless constraint.
Afternoon breezes set off the tiniest ruffle of sound, as if plants in their brass urns were speaking leaf language together, sending messages across the parquetry, communing around the fringed standing-lamps and plush-covered chairs.
Olive regarded her father with condescension as she stepped barefoot into the green drawing room. She swung her tennis shoes, tied by the laces, in a gesture contrived to annoy.
He asked about her game; she told him the score. There was no novelty in this conversation for father and daughter, only practised lines, languid as ping-pong, dodging the ferns. Then she announced her intention to leave.
Father barely blinked. ‘You’ll need a chaperone, a new trunk and letters of introduction.’
It might have been his own dream, to up and leave.
‘Just money,’ Olive responded. And they both knew what she meant. Money was everything. He’d spent a lifetime telling her so. The ferns in unison seemed vigorously to nod.
It was a conspiracy between them. Olive said she would stay in London with her older sister, Violet, since ‘London’ had an inviolable probity and prestige. It meant glamorous relatives, serious shopping and monumental history. It meant poise, the right hat, a smoothing of colonial vowels, submission to papery aunts, crisp and folded. But Germany was her true destination. She’d spent a year in Dresden being ‘finished’ at the age of fifteen and now longed to return.
~
Olive was still in London when war broke out. Her wealth allowed her to imagine adventure, not trenches. Predictably, Violet had married a banker, but Olive wanted no such domestic destiny, no gentleman named Alfred in Kensal Green, buttoning his grey tweed waistcoat in the wide hall mirror, adjusting his rabbit-hair trilby, taking his umbrella from the elephant’s foot stand by the doorway, hanging it on his arm fixedly, as if he too was inanimate. Olive watched this early morning ritual with distaste.
