The following year Semmeya was married, and three days before her wedding we were invited to see her trousseau, and to be feasted and presented with gifts. We had reached the age when we began to talk of love and marriage in tones of awe, with the ignorance of children and the half-awakened knowledge of womanhood. And, after we came away from her, we put our heads together and whispered our hope that her husband would never find out what we knew about her character.
CHAPTER XII
HOW I WAS SOLD TO ST GEORGE
SHORTLY after Semmeya’s wedding an epidemic of typhoid fever swept over Constantinople. Owing to our unsanitary drainage conditions such epidemics were not rare. All four of us had the fever. With me it was so acute, and lasted so long, that the doctors gave me up as a sickly child who had not the strength to battle for health. My lengthy illness left me alive, it is true, but as a fire leaves standing a structure which it has completely destroyed within. Apparently there remained nothing solid to build on. The doctors intimated as much when they said I might eat and do what pleased me—and went away.
To them I was only a hopeless patient. It was different with my mother: she would not give up the fight.
In her despair, and when science failed her, she turned to what in reality she always had more faith in—her religion, and particularly her favourite saint, St George of the Bells. Him she had inherited from the paternal side of her family, of which he had been—shall I say—the idol, for more than two hundred years.
I did not share her predilection. My own particular saint was St Nicholas, even then when I was beginning to take pride in my critical attitude toward religion. Looking back, and raising the veil from my once ardent devotion, I must admit that my partiality originated in a life-size icon, painted by a celebrated Russian, and presented by the Russian church to the monastery of St Nicholas, where I used to go for my devotions. I was only four years old when the icon was sent, but I fell an immediate victim to its beauty. Had it represented St Gregory or St Aloysius, my devotion would have been the same. It is always thus with us: scratch a Greek and you will find a pagan.
However, when my mother told me that she was going to send for St George of the Bells, I raised no objection. I knew enough of his deeds to have a respectful fear of him. Among the orthodox Greeks, especially among those who, like us, lived on the sea of Marmora, to send for a saint is an awe-inspiring act. One does not have recourse to it except as a last resort. It is, moreover, an expense that few can afford, though I have known poor Greek families to sell even their household effects to have the saint brought to them.
From the moment that it was decided the saint should be sent for, our house was in a tumult of cleaning. My room especially was made immaculate, and I was put into my finest nightgown. No coquette was ever more carefully arrayed for the visit of a handsome young doctor than I was for the saint. A large table, covered with a new white cloth, was placed near my bed. On it was an incense-burner, flowers, and a bowl of water—to be blessed, and used to bathe my face so long as it should last.
Two men, for their strength and size called pallikaria, had gone for the icon. St George of the Bells, though on the same island with us, had his monastery up on the highest summit of the mountains, several miles from our house. In order to receive the saint with proper ceremony my mother sent for the parish priests. They arrived shortly before the icon, dressed in their most festive robes of silver thread, and with their long curls floating over their shoulders.