by Tatiana Pentes

Spanning London, Shanghai, Kythera and Sydney, Nostalgia is a lyrical novella about exile, family mythology, maternal longing and the quiet art of survival. At its centre is Natalya, eldest daughter of the formidable Greek matriarch Stavroula, who grows up amid fractured marriages, shifting loyalties and emotional instability, determined to create the steadiness and love she was denied. Haunted by childhood memories of an art nouveau mirror engraved Nostalgia, a dolls’ house, unanswered telephones and an absent father, Natalya also inherits the elegance of her Russian grandmother Xenia, once a singer in Shanghai’s French Concession. As the family becomes entangled in sibling rivalries, favoritism and symbolic struggles over inheritance, Natalya and her husband Juan build a tender, enduring life in Sydney, raising their son Pedro with unconditional love. In the end, on the ancestral island of Kythera, among olive groves and ancient stone houses, Natalya learns that peace lies not in reconciling with the past, but in keeping a dignified distance from it. Nostalgia is a philosophical meditation on mothers and daughters, belonging and loss, and how beauty can emerge from rupture.

A short novella

I. THE MIRROR

By the time Natalya was sixty, she understood that families, like orchestras, rarely played in tune.

She lived in Sydney where the morning light was clean and almost judicial. Ferries crossed the harbour with the indifferent precision of surgical instruments. Jacaranda petals drifted across the path outside her house, gathering in violet drifts along the fence as though some private celebration had been abandoned overnight. Her husband Juan rose early, cut toast diagonally, and believed that most crises could be reduced by tea, weather, or not answering the telephone. Their son Pedro arrived in the evenings after work and training, broad-shouldered, courteous, carrying the uncomplicated gravity of a man who had been loved properly.

This, Natalya thought, was what home looked like when it had not been built from fear.

Yet in the hallway hung the mirror.

Oval, art nouveau, brass vines climbing its edges like a patient infestation. Across the top, in fading gold script, a single word:

Nostalgia.

It had hung first in the bedroom of her Russian grandparents, above a walnut dressing table polished to a dark underwater sheen. She had been six when she first stared at that word without yet being able to read it. Her mother Stavroula had gone away to a seaside retreat with an American psychiatrist. Her father had disappeared north with a jazz band. She remembered the wardrobe doors open, his clothes gone, the pale geometry of absence. She remembered throwing herself onto the wooden floorboards and listening to them as if messages might travel upward through the timber grain. She remembered trying to telephone her mother and hearing only a marine hiss.

Later she would understand that her life had begun there: not at birth, but on that floor, looking upward into the mirror’s mute announcement.

The child had learned what adults meant by gone.

Not death.
Not even hatred.
Just the removal of human weather.

When the house became too silent, her grandmother Xenia entered with a silver tray of tea and lemon slices, stepping around catastrophe with the poise of a woman who had outlived empires. Xenia did not explain anything. She did not kneel and say the child would be all right. She simply remained. In certain lineages, that was a greater tenderness than speech.

Much later, Natalya would realize that the mirror had named her inheritance more truthfully than any family story ever had. Not property. Not rank. Not bloodline.

Nostalgia.

The ache for what one could not return to, and perhaps had never fully possessed.

II. XENIA

Before Sydney, before Notting Hill, before Kythera entered the family like a litigated prayer, there had been Shanghai.

Not the city of present towers and LED weather, but the older Shanghai of the French Concession and the International Settlement, where roads bore foreign names and each district performed a separate civilisation. Avenue Joffre beneath plane trees. The Cathay Hotel shimmering above the Bund. Ballrooms lit from below. Dance bands, Chinese opera, émigré salons, brown-shoed diplomats, white-gloved hostesses, taxi dancers, Russian bakeries, Jewish tailors, sailors, pianists, priests, smugglers, acrobats, publishers, widows, and those who had fled one war only to dress for another.

Xenia was born for that city in the way certain women are born for twilight: they make it appear arranged on purpose.

Her people were Russian, from another continent of snow and memory, but exile had refined rather than reduced her. She had the aristocratic stillness of old photographs and the practical intelligence of women who understand that civilisation, if it is to continue, must be recreated every morning out of linen, posture and tea. By the time the Revolution had torn Russia into categories and the routes eastward filled with the displaced, she had already begun acquiring the gifts of the durable: style without extravagance, grief without spectacle, affection without dependency.

She arrived in Shanghai through the great corridor of émigré chance, that railway-and-port geography through which so many White Russians passed: Harbin, Tsingtao, treaty ports, temporary apartments, dances, new names, old songs. The city offered no absolution, but it offered surfaces, and surfaces were often enough.

Sergei found her in one of the ballrooms.

He had several names, as displaced men do: Serge Ermoll to newspapers and posters, Sergei Ermolaeff in family memory, sometimes merely “Serge” to those who wanted to turn survival into style. He was Russian by inheritance, Chinese by documents, Shanghainese by necessity. Bald early, elegant anyway, he carried a baton like a minor sceptre and understood rhythm not as entertainment but as governance. When he raised an arm, strangers moved together.

At the Paramount Ballroom he led an orchestra that could make the city forget itself for exactly the length of a foxtrot. White walls, chrome rails, coloured lights glowing under glass floors, chorus girls, military men, visiting celebrities, rich Chinese industrialists, European hostesses, American jazzmen passing through, all of them reassembled nightly beneath Sergei’s arrangements. The room changed colour with the music. Couples crossed the floor like beautiful diplomatic errors.

Xenia watched him from the edge of the dance floor with the detached devotion of someone recognizing her own species.

Their marriage began in a city where nothing seemed durable except appetite. Yet some marriages begin not in innocence but in mutual recognition: the knowledge that the other person has also survived dislocation and still insists on entering rooms correctly.

They rented apartments in the French Concession with tall shutters and balconies over streets where Chinese hawkers and Russian grand ladies moved past one another in layered worlds. In the mornings the city smelt of soy, bread and petrol. By evening it smelled of cigarettes, perfume, river damp, and brass instruments warming under electric heat.

Xenia arranged each room as if form itself were a prayer. A scarf became a curtain. A lacquer tray turned into a table. Cut flowers, even a few, altered the moral pressure of the day. If Sergei ruled tempo, Xenia ruled atmosphere. The child Asja, Xenia’s niece, would remember her not through sentences but through gestures: a gloved hand lifting a cup, powder brushed across a cheekbone, a profile caught in a dressing mirror, the way she crossed a room as if music had not yet stopped.

This was not frivolity. It was civic labour.

III. ASJA

Asja was born in Shanghai into a world that believed catastrophe could be held at bay by polish.

Her father was handsome, a swimmer, intermittent. Her mother was beautiful in the way storms are beautiful from behind glass. “You were an accident,” she told the child often enough that it ceased to sound like information and became weather. “I never wanted you.” Such phrases, repeated early, sink beneath language and become part of the bloodstream.

The father left when she was five. What she remembered of him came in flashes: learning to swim because he threw her into water and walked away, trusting she would survive; summer light in Tsingtao; a gentleness available only in fragments. Missing someone, she would later discover, is not a judgement of their conduct. Love survives conduct the way weeds survive pavement.

After the separation, Asja and her mother moved nearer Xenia and Sergei, into the orbit of the Paramount. The hotel’s enormous ballroom became a second nervous system for the child: chrome, milky glass, dance floors lit from beneath, rehearsals in the morning, tea dances in the afternoon, great night performances in which adults remade themselves under light. She ran the corridors with Smokey Friml, peering through keyholes, half-feral with curiosity. Buck Clayton bounced her on his knee. Chorus girls rehearsed routines that she mimicked perfectly, earning the admiration of choreographers and the impatience of adults.

There were cemeteries too. Her amah, a large peasant woman with bound feet and a moon-bright face, was supposed to take her to the park but preferred the cemetery nearby. The child wandered among tombstones, reading faded photographs as if they were icons. She invented stories for the dead and found them more companionable than many of the living.

There were festivals. Cheongsams. Lanterns dragged behind strings. Chinese opera singers with white faces and painted eyes like masks. Spun sugar in impossible colours. The amah’s hair uncoiled once a year with its hidden ornaments of gold and jade. A carpenter’s wood shavings became homemade hair wash. In all these details the child discovered what later became her native philosophy: the world might be cruel, but it remained inexhaustibly theatrical.

Then the war years broke over Shanghai like a metal sky.

Bombings. Red-orange horizons where the Chinese city burned. Refugees without limbs. Beggars. Dead bodies in the Huangpu. Leprous faces in the street. Japanese soldiers with bayonets and impassive eyes. Blackout curtains thick as punishment. Rats climbing into bedrooms at night. Hunger, maggots in bread, grease boiled down and spread with salt. And still dance lessons continued, in freezing studios, with shoes handmade from glue and canvas because none could be bought. The body persisted even where history had become obscene.

Asja danced through war as if motion itself might outwit death.

She saw too much. A dead baby in a Chinese mother’s arms. A Japanese soldier spearing mother and child through in one efficient movement. A great-grandmother laid out on a dining table surrounded by candles, then the final involuntary sigh of the corpse. A molester on a ship deck. Adults who refused to hear. None of this left clean scars. But it left intelligence.

When war ended, youth returned with an almost offensive brilliance. Clubs reopened. The French Club regained its glamour. Friends gathered. Dresses were worn. Men noticed her now. Her beauty, denied by her mother for years, revealed itself not as vanity but as fact. The body became once again a social instrument rather than merely a disciplined one.

Then came marriage to Marty, the American banker, proposed in the atmosphere of postwar release and accepted partly from longing, partly from exhaustion, partly from the terrible impulse to escape one pain by entering another structure altogether. Youth often mistakes motion for freedom.

America awaited.

IV. STAVROULA

If Xenia’s life was organised by elegance, Stavroula’s was organised by force.

By old age she lived in London among ormolu clocks, icons, photographs of husbands, and an ever-thickening weather system of narrative. She had three children by three husbands, and from this fact built not humility but jurisdiction. Her voice travelled by telephone across cities and time zones with astonishing stamina. She distributed praise, grievance, anxiety, nostalgia, and accusations with equal refinement.

She had once been beautiful enough to make obedience seem voluntary. Even in age she retained the gestures of helplessness that compel others to serve. Yet beneath the charm lay a harder machinery: martyrdom, manipulation, injury converted into leverage. She could divide daughters with a phrase, sons with a silence, grandchildren with a preference no one was foolish enough to call arbitrary.

Natalya, her eldest, had inherited her eyes and intelligence. That made forgiveness impossible.

Marina, the second daughter, occupied the family like a beautiful diplomatic ambiguity. Questions had always hovered around her paternity, never clarified, only stylised. Stavroula called her “my Greek daughter,” and Natalya “my Russian daughter,” as if categorisation could replace truth. Of Marina she said, “the pretty one.” Of Natalya, “the intelligent one.” Thus she divided what should have been whole, assigning beauty to one daughter and intellect to another, as though daughters were rooms one furnished according to grievance.

At sixteen, Natalya’s surname was changed at the registry office to Stavroula’s own, presented as a birthday gift. It was a gesture of possession disguised as beneficence. Marina later reverted to a long Russian paternal name in search of her own coherence. Both acts revealed the same hidden fact: names in this family were never just names. They were arguments in progress.

The youngest son, Antonis, understood his mother’s climate instinctively. He remained closest, accepted her versions of things as if they were weather reports rather than provocations. His wife Severine, French, intelligent, observant, entered the family as an outsider and was swiftly enlisted into the gravitational field. Their daughter Rosie, adored, became the new emblem of continuity.

Around Stavroula gathered documents, trust papers, ledgers, wills, signatures, the secular liturgy of modern inheritance. By late life she had transformed savings, superannuation, and ambition into a family trust and a business structure in which she was CEO and the golden son’s household worked within her orbit. There was no great estate, only the administrative theatre of one. Yet in certain families even a filing cabinet can acquire dynastic power.

Stavroula understood what many matriarchs do: if love is uncertain, structure can masquerade as permanence.

V. MARINA

Marina lived in a cultivated house in London’s outer west, among orderly hedges, framed prints, polished taps, and the calm of a strong marriage. Her husband Andrej built things that stood up well in weather. Their life had property, routine, independent work, and the clean satisfactions of earned stability.

From the outside Marina appeared to have escaped.

Yet ambiguity is not always visible. Sometimes it sits in the room like a discreet guest no one introduces. Her father—or the man believed to be her father—hovered in family history as a possibility never wholly ratified. Stavroula’s language did not dispel confusion; it institutionalised it. “My Greek daughter.” “The pretty one.” A life can be beautifully furnished and still contain one locked drawer.

Marina learned, as second daughters often do, the art of inhabiting instability with grace. Neither openly scapegoated nor richly favoured, she floated between camps, recruited when useful, ignored when not. She loved her sister. She loved peace more. She had built a life strong enough that no document or favour from the mother line was necessary to sustain her. Yet blood is never only blood. It is narrative, and narrative stains.

At night she sometimes studied her face in mirrors, searching for passports in the lines of her mouth, cheekbones, eyes. She knew the search was absurd. She continued anyway.

VI. ANTONIS

Antonis lived in London as if he had been promised more.

Not extravagance exactly, but significance. He moved through cafés, offices, errands and family duties with the confidence of a man who believed proximity itself conferred rank. He had no property of his own, no independent cushion of age, no settled ballast except the structures organised by Stavroula: the trust, the business, the daily orbit of mother, wife, child, and administrative access.

This made him vigilant.

He carried papers, codes, permissions, grudges. He knew which drawer contained which document. He knew how much future he believed had been arranged on his behalf. The family trust, though not vast, condensed several things into one object: security, maternal favour, legitimacy, narrative victory. Threaten the trust and one threatened not merely anticipated assets but the symbolic proof that he was the chosen son.

People who appear entitled are often terrified.

Antonis feared interruption. He feared comparison with those who had built lives independently. He feared any male presence who might rival him in usefulness, closeness or competence. That was why Pedro unsettled him. There had been a period when Stavroula had a soft spot for her grandson, especially after the death of her third husband when Pedro sat beside her through court proceedings and held her hand while wills, trusts and legal enclosures reconfigured the emotional landscape. Pedro had shown loyalty in fluorescent corridors where loyalty is more visible than at Christmas tables. He worked in real estate, managed things competently, and did not need future promises to define him.

To Antonis, this must have appeared intolerable.

Affection, in insecure systems, is interpreted as competition.

VII. PEDRO

Pedro grew into the opposite of inherited drama.

As a child he sensed family tension before he understood its architecture. By adolescence he had learned that some conversations should not be prolonged and some households should be left before dessert. He chose the world of property, where documents at least pretended clarity, and Muay Thai, where rules were explicit, pain immediate, and respect earned rather than performed.

His mother loved him with the directness she had wanted as a child. That altered him fundamentally. He possessed what the family of origin could never produce on its own: inner ballast.

When Stavroula, Antonis, his wife and baby needed a luxury apartment after being displaced from another property, it was Pedro who used his professional skills to secure one. The lease, however, was law, not mythology: Stavroula alone was listed. One set of keys was issued. This single metallic fact destabilised the family more efficiently than decades of emotional injury.

They wanted another set.

Official procedures existed. The family disliked procedures when procedures contradicted appetite. Antonis and Stavroula went to Pedro’s real estate office, behaved aggressively, demanded access, exposed him professionally. A private key cutter was approached; the key cutter, more ethical than the family arrangement, contacted the agency to verify legitimacy. Pedro’s job was placed in jeopardy. His boss and property manager knew exactly who the parties were. Nepotism and impropriety gathered like static.

Then came the accusation: that the matriarch and baby had been trapped in the apartment because Antonis, holding the only key while moving furniture, had left them inside; that Pedro’s failure to answer a call had therefore endangered the child.

The accusation was false in substance and perfect in symbolism.

It converted their own procedural violation into his moral blame.

Pedro withdrew immediately.

He vowed to his mother he would have no more contact with the matriarch, Antonis, or his wife. He understood something earlier than Natalya did: there are moments when disengagement is not abandonment, but self-respect.

VIII. JUAN

Juan had no use for elaborate family mythologies, though he respected their dramatic potential.

Born elsewhere, practical by temperament, he viewed Natalya’s family as one might view an overdecorated stage set after the actors have left—impressive, faintly ridiculous, structurally unsound. Yet he loved his wife with the endurance of someone who understands that marriage is less opera than architecture. Beam, lintel, repeated repairs, the humble genius of staying.

He watched the latest crises without haste. The keys incident. The accusations. The threatened cutting off “as a bundle” of daughter, husband, grandson. The inevitable phone call from the golden line wife seeking to impose administrative reality upon emotion. When Natalya finally replied that the relationship was over, he said very little. Instead he made tea, checked the garden, and ensured that silence in their house remained safe rather than punitive.

He knew that the worst families colonise time. They force one to think about them after they have left the room. His task, as he saw it, was simple: prevent colonisation.

In the evenings he sat beside Natalya on the patio while lorikeets dismantled the fig tree with obscene enthusiasm. Sometimes she spoke of her mother. Sometimes of Xenia. Sometimes of Shanghai, though she had never seen it. Sometimes of nothing at all. Thirty years beside one person had taught him the true forms of loyalty: presence, not correction; humour, not solutions; coffee made before grief becomes articulate.

IX. SEVERINE

Severine came from Marseille and retained the sea’s habit of observing without explaining.

In the family she functioned first as outsider, then as spouse, then as gatekeeper, then—fatally perhaps—as emblem. She loved her daughter Rosie and her husband in ways that were not necessarily strategic, but she quickly learned that within Stavroula’s orbit love and structure were inseparable. To be close to the matriarch was to become part of the operating system.

At first she may have believed she was simply helping. Managing things. Clarifying. Protecting mother and child. Young women entering old family structures often mistake participation for neutrality.

But old systems assign roles swiftly.

She became the wife of the golden line, the mother of the new adored child, the enforcer of boundaries, the messenger of exclusion. What she represented to Natalya mattered more than whatever she privately thought of herself. She was the face of replacement, legitimacy, continuity, and future access all at once.

When she contacted Natalya after Stavroula’s declaration that the eldest daughter, her husband, and son would be cut off as a bundle, she may have imagined herself acting reasonably. Natalya heard instead the final note of an old composition: one more younger woman speaking with delegated authority from a mother who had never once chosen her simply.

So she ended it.

Not because Severine alone had done everything. But because she had become the visible edge of the entire machinery.

X. ROSIE

Rosie grew.

Children possess the revolutionary ability of becoming themselves despite the symbolic burdens placed upon them. Around her the adults conducted grievance, legacy, identity and succession. She, meanwhile, learned language, balance, appetite, and the moral excitement of puddles. Stavroula adored her with the language of consumption: wanting to “eat” her because she was so beautiful. It was ordinary cute aggression, perhaps, but in a family fluent in hierarchy even ordinary affection acquired an ornamental excess.

Rosie became what such children often become: a blank screen onto which everyone projected continuity.

Yet she remained merely a child.

That, Natalya thought, was perhaps the only hope for the future: that the next generation might fail to take the symbolism seriously enough.

XI. LONDON

In London, rain polished everything into false coherence.

Stavroula’s flat in Notting Hill filled with objects that had outlived their owners: icons, clocks, framed husbands, shawls, papers, silver boxes, and the grand fatigue of old migration. The city outside moved with its usual bureaucratic melancholy. Buses crossed wet streets. People carried umbrellas like institutional habits. In winter the light withdrew by four o’clock, leaving interiors to thicken into thought.

Marina visited with flowers. Antonis visited with concerns. Severine came with Rosie and practical competence. Natalya seldom visited at all.

And yet the absence remained populated.

Stavroula sometimes asked where “the Russian girl” had gone. Sometimes she re-told stories of Kythera as if the island could settle the arguments of Europe, Russia, and family inheritance at once. She spoke of old injustices done to her in her own Greek family: sons favoured, daughters disfavoured, property redirected, the black sheep named and cast out. It never occurred to her that she had merely translated the pattern into another century and another set of children.

Unhealed people often reproduce with astonishing fidelity what once wounded them.

XII. KYTHERA

The island waited beyond all family chronology.

Kythera lay south of the Peloponnese like a thought one has while waking—olives, stucco houses, Venetian fortifications, bells crossing valleys, plaster repaired so many times that repair itself had become the architecture. Here Aphrodite was said to have risen from foam, which meant the ancients knew what modern families tried to deny: beauty emerges not from innocence but rupture.

Natalya visited in late middle age.

The roads wound through terraces of olive trees whose trunks twisted into shapes more muscular than many men’s convictions. White houses leaned into weather. Blue shutters flaked in the sun. Cats occupied stone steps with liturgical entitlement. The island felt neither like home nor foreignness. It felt older than both categories.

Stavroula had always invoked Kythera symbolically. Natalya discovered the factual island instead: wells, ravines, rough roads, chapels, ordinary labour, annual endurance. No olive tree asked who had inherited correctly. No stone compared daughters. The island recognised weather, not grievance.

At dusk, standing above a cove where sea met rock in a long breath of silver, she thought of all the family’s quests for legitimacy: names changed, fathers doubted, daughters categorised, sons favoured, trusts created, documents filed, accusations made. Kythera was older than all of it. The olive trees had outlived empires, exiles, marriages, and legal devices. They made a quieter proposition:

Twist if you must.
Bear fruit if you can.
Stand where you are.

There, among the terraces, Natalya understood that peace would not arrive through reconciliation with the system. Peace would come through scale. The family drama reduced itself under the island’s geology to its proper size: one generation’s noise against o