Free The House in Smyrna by Tatiana Salem Levy Page A

These were the people I had to look up when I got to Smyrna. According to my grandfather, it wouldn’t be hard to find them, because it was a small community and he’d received news of them only a few years earlier from some cousins in France. Yes, maybe the channels would be open and I’d find them easily, but then what? What was I supposed to do after I located them? I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to say, that I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with those people of whom I knew nothing. I knew that in some way, at some point, we crossed paths on the same family tree. But what did they do? What did they think? How did they live? Would we have any affinities, subjects of mutual interest? Or would they be as foreign to me as the people I saw in the streets of Istanbul, as the people I had come across by chance and whom I would probably never see again? I was hesitant, but at the same time anxious to find out what was going to happen on this journey, in the story I was telling myself.
    When you leaned over to whisper sweetly in my ear, I knew you were going to ask me to do something: Tomorrow, I want you to go out for the day and only come back in the evening. I want you to wear a miniskirt without anything underneath. Yes, you heard me: I want you completely naked underneath.
    This journey is a lie: I’ve never left this musty bed. My body rots a little more each day, I’m riddled with pustules, and soon I’ll be nothing but bones. My legs are covered in weeping wounds and my flesh is raw. How could I undertake such a journey? I have no joints; my bones are fused to one another. The only way I could leave this bed is if someone were to carry me, but who would pick up such a repugnant body? What for? I have the silence and solitude of an entire family in me, of generations and generations. As if all the happy things that they all lived had dissipated into the air, leaving only the sad ones. When I was born, my parents took one look at me and knew that I was sadness and solitude. That after me there would be nothing, because after sadness and solitude there is nothing. Ever since I was a girl, it’s always been the same: whenever someone looks at me, I see fear cross their face, because I came into the world old and I carry death in my eyes.
    I have never left the spot, I have never travelled, I know nothing but the darkness of my room. The key my grandfather gave me is still beside me, lying on the bed as if it were part of my putrid body. We are both the colour of worn bronze, covered in dust. It is as if we were one, so rusted that, in a person’s hand, we would be nothing but dust, lumps of flesh, and shards of metal.
    Don’t you ever think about positive things? Don’t you have any dreams? I do, of course I do. I dream that one day a prince will come to fetch me on a white horse. I won’t need to make any effort. He’ll know that I’m the woman he has been looking for. All we’ll have to do is look at each other to know we were made for one another. He’ll offer me his hand and take me, on horseback, to a beautiful place, where there will be a big party, where I will be reunited with everyone who has already departed this world and everyone that is still in it. We’ll live happily there, in a land that knows no death, no time, no pain. So you dream? Of course I dream. I have another dream that I’ve never told anyone. What is it? My dream, Mother, is to write. To write? Yes, I have this impossible dream: to write and write and write.
    He had sworn never to love another woman and, although he wished he could undo his promise, it was what ended up happening. When he saw Hilda at the club dance, he knew he would make a home with her. He also knew that he would cultivate affection and admiration for her, but never the love he had felt for Rosa. He had two left feet, and stepped on Hilda’s toes. He didn’t know the music had a beat to