Children of the Catastrophe by Sarah Shoemaker

Author:Sarah Shoemaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

EMMANUEL, THE THIRD SURVIVING CHILD OF VASILI AND LIANA Demirgis, was born on the last day of February, 1915. He was a large, chubby, healthy “ten-month baby” as the midwife called him. His parents cooed over him; his four-year-old brother, Dimitri, laughed at the seemingly random movements of his arms and legs; and his two-year-old sister, named by custom after her paternal grandmother but called Vaioush, tried to climb into the cradle with him.

Downstairs in the parlor, his grandmother Vaia, into whose house he was born, simmered. She was still bedridden, almost five years after what her son and his wife continued to call her “accident,” managing with help the few steps between her bed and a chair. Occasionally, for a change of scene, when the weather was warm enough and there was no wind, Vasili would carry her to a chair on the veranda. Vaia still deeply resented the loss of control her immobility had forced upon her. There were parts of the house she hadn’t seen in years—heaven only knew what condition they were in by now. Vasili was, after all this time and all those babies, still so besotted with his wife that he wouldn’t notice if the house were falling down around him.

And the new maid was worse than a disaster as far as Vaia was concerned. Aspasia had left in the fall, going to America as a bride for some man who’d come back to Smyrna long enough to find himself a wife. Aspasia had proudly brought him to the house, showing him off as if he were some fat prize, but Vaia had observed the ill-fitting suit and the grime under his fingernails and the too-long hair and the untrimmed mustache and she had nodded to herself. Aspasia had taken the nods for approval, but they had only been Vaia’s way of confirming to herself what she had suspected from the first: a village girl from a family of no importance at all, twenty-five years old now if she was a day—she’d come to Vaia fifteen years ago from a family who claimed she was twelve, but Vaia had suspected at the time that the girl was only ten—what kind of husband could such a girl hope to get? There was no one to guarantee she was even a virgin. A husband in America was probably the best she could hope for.

And then Liana had hired a new one—a Turk, no less, a woman with three half-grown children and a man she claimed was her husband but who was rarely in evidence. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the older of the Turk’s children were twins, two girls as different looking as possible—one dark and slight, the other robust and red haired. Clearly there had been two fathers, and that, one could only assume, was without doubt only the beginning of a story that was too tawdry to tell.

Oh yes, the Turk made a big show of working, polishing the floors every

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