Eleni (12 page)

By the time school opened, the Gatzoyiannis family and everyone else in Lia were living on a diet which, along with
bobota
, consisted almost exclusively of
shilira
—a porridge made by thickening goat’s milk with some yogurt and yeast and allowing it to sit for a day. It was enough to keep them alive, but Eleni, like all village women, tried ingenious ways to supplement it. Kanta and Olga combed the woods and fields for wild onions and dandelion greens, which Eleni boiled and thickened with corn flour. On wet mornings the children swarmed up the mountain gathering fat snails, which were cooked with garlic and tomatoes. Anastasia Yakou, two houses below Eleni’s, could no longer find chores for herself and her daughters to do in exchange for scraps. One day Kanta saw the eldest Yakou girl, Stavroula, bearing homeward a large wood tortoise. She watched, horrified, as Stavroula stood poised over the mottled gray-green shell, two forks at the ready, until the head ventured far enough out to be skewered.

Olga and Kanta complained the loudest about the inevitable
bobota
and
shilira
while Glykeria finished off their uneaten portions. Olga was certain her beauty was fading, while Kanta, who had always been finicky about food, grew even thinner and wept at the memory of rich spinach-and-cheese pies and stews of goat in gravy with onions and potatoes.

As the snows began, the number of students in Minas’ classes dwindled daily, and those who appeared learned nothing, but huddled close to the wood-burning stove and fell asleep. Minas shouted and rapped them on the head with his ruler, but he knew that no one could bewitch children into learning the alphabet when they were starving.

The unseasonable cold added to the miseries of the first winter of the occupation. From November on it snowed every day. As the drifts became deeper, the number of students shrank to those who lived a stone’s throw from the school. Children often fainted in class. Minas doggedly continued to chant his lessons, determined to carry on until there were no students left to listen. But when Father Zisis began draping the white satin Christmas banners on the altar of the Church of the Holy Trinity next door, there were only six students still attending school. Among those who had disappeared were Kanta and Glykeria Gatzoyiannis.

In the kitchen of the Gatzoyiannis house the girls contemplated their portions of the white, viscous
shilira
, Kanta complaining that the very sight
of it made her sick. Eleni told them sharply to eat it; they wouldn’t see any more for the next two weeks. Their suddenly hopeful faces fell as she reminded them that the Christmas fast was beginning. From now on, milk, eggs, cheese—anything that came from an animal with blood—was prohibited until the feast day.

Clutching her belly histrionically, Glykeria wailed that God couldn’t be cruel enough to expect them to fast when they were already starving. In the unhappy silence that followed, she began to console herself aloud with fantasies of the roast kid they would have on Christmas Day, garnished with potatoes, savory with oregano and garlic, dripping with juices. Eleni couldn’t bring herself to tell them there would be no meat for Christmas; they couldn’t afford to slaughter one of their half-dozen remaining goats for a single meal when it could be traded for two weeks’ worth of corn flour. Her children were still too young and spoiled to imagine that one of the two great feast days of the year could pass without a taste of meat. Her voice hard, Eleni lectured the girls that they would survive the fasting days well enough eating potatoes, boiled greens and
bobota;
they should be grateful they had that.

Olga was sulking. Her mind was concerned not with food but with the other privilege that came with Christmas. The joyful mass on Christmas Day was one of the two occasions in the year when the eligible men in the village had an opportunity to appraise the charms of prospective brides.

“Why should I fast when I couldn’t possibly take communion?” Olga burst out. “You can’t expect me to show myself to the village like this.” She had on her only dress, black wool, shiny with age and patched at the elbows. Eleni sighed and didn’t answer. Olga, nearly fourteen, was a headstrong girl who believed that life was not worth living without a bright velvet dress, trimmed with the three black stripes of braid on bodice and skirt to indicate a family of high status.

A few nights later, after a sullen meal of
bobota
and greens boiled with onions, Eleni examined the stores in the small room behind the good chamber. The wooden chests full of dried cod and the canned goods that Christos had laid in on his last visit were depleted long ago, and now even the dried figs and the olive oil were nearly gone. Garlands of onions, garlic and mountain tea whispered as she passed. There was a slice of moon hanging outside the window, surrounded by the haze that promises snow.

Back in the kitchen, Eleni sat down on the floor next to the wooden cradle. Nikola was chewing his fist in his sleep, his eyes sunken, his thin face looking like a worried old man’s. His features—small, finely chiseled mouth, wide forehead, high cheekbones and deep-set eyes—were copies of her own, but his fair hair was lighter than her chestnut braids.

Eleni always regarded her son with wonder. Afraid that the intensity of her love for him would attract the evil eye, she tucked paper images of saints into his clothing for protection. He was her pride and her obsession, and
the greatest happiness she had ever known was the day of his birth, July 23, 1939.

It had happened on the third day of the annual festival in honor of the village’s patron saint, the Prophet Elias. The saint’s pagan predecessor had been Helios, the sun god, and on every July 20th, in a ritual that was thousands of years old, the inhabitants of this mountain climbed to the highest peak as dawn broke, lit bonfires, sacrificed a rooster and prayed for a year of fine weather. After the prayers at dawn, the Liotes descended to the Vrisi, the triangle of flatland just below the peak where the itinerant dark-skinned
yifti
musicians were ready with clarinet, fiddle and tambourine to begin the dancing and feasting.

Eleni had stayed behind in the Perivoli, knowing her time was near. On the third day she sent Olga up to the dancing field to bring the midwife, Vasilena Kyrkou, and Eleni’s sister-in-law Alexo Gatzoyiannis, who had agreed to assist at the birth.

The two arrived shortly after noon, giddy with the dancing and wine, and found Eleni lying curled up, her body focused on the pains. The midwife put on a clean apron and began boiling a narcotic tea from the flowers of the village’s only lime tree while Alexo massaged Eleni’s belly.

The girls huddled on the other side of the closed kitchen door, frightened by their mother’s groans. As the hours passed, Eleni’s mother crept into the kitchen and crouched in the corner, waiting like a thin, sharp-beaked black bird. The good-natured midwife whispered to Eleni that her father, Kitso, was puttering in the garden outside, staying within earshot while pretending to take no interest in what was happening. Although he would never show his feelings, the miller was undoubtedly reflecting that he had fathered six daughters, four of them dead, one sterile and the last a mother of four girls. If he was ever to see a male descendant to his line, this was his last chance.

As the sun set, the shadows of the cypresses around St. Demetrios were reaching up the mountainside when the midwife announced that the baby was ready to come. Alexo helped Eleni stand. Vasilena threw a sash over one of the ceiling beams, and while Alexo clutched her in a bear hug, holding her up, Eleni pulled on the sash with all the strength she had left.

The rhythmic contractions, faster now, with no respite, carried Eleni off on a tide of pain, her only anchor the strong grip of her sister-in-law. She moaned with each wave, pulling on the sash, the muscles of her belly like iron bands. There was a pain worse than all the others, a rush of blood, and the baby was expelled into the midwife’s waiting hands as Eleni lost consciousness and Alexo gently lowered her to the floor.

Quickly Vasilena wrapped the child, glancing mischievously in the direction of Megali, and sighing, “Oh dear, another girl!” The old woman threw her apron over her head and began to keen, but the midwife’s next words
silenced her. Calling Olga from the hall, Vasilena said, “Go out into the garden, child, and get me your grandfather’s hat!”

The word “hat” set everyone screaming. Olga, Alexo, Megali, Kanta and Glykeria rushed to see what the midwife held. They all knew why she wanted Kitso’s hat: the bearer of great news,
shariki
, must snatch the hat off the head of the lucky recipient until it is ransomed with money. Vasilena had news for Kitso Haidis that was worth a sovereign at least. But she never got his hat. The moment Olga asked for it, the white-haired miller seized the girl with a cry and swung her around—the first time anyone had ever seen him embrace one of his granddaughters.

There was a babble of female voices around Eleni’s pallet and then one deep one, her father’s, shouting, “If you’re torturing me with a joke, midwife, I’ll kill you! Let me see the boy!”

The word “boy” seemed to echo and re-echo. Eleni opened her eyes to see the midwife grinning, holding in her white apron a red thing, surely too tiny to be human, flexing and unflexing and mewling angrily. Eleni reached out to take him. Her body felt the first raw pain of separation and of loving too much. She lay back against the pillow. At last she had fulfilled her purpose as a woman.

In the twenty-nine months that passed, the tiny creature grew to fill the empty places in her life: the absence of her husband, the void caused by her mother-in-law’s death. But in December of 1941 when Eleni looked at the boy, she saw how thin the little arms had become and she was seized by a fear greater than any that had gone before: Nikola was starving to death.

The only quarter she could turn to for help was her father. Kitso had always been cold and silent to his children, and Eleni had longed to marry to escape his tyranny. But beneath the hard words and silences that passed between father and daughter, she knew there was love as well as anger. Her father surely could not refuse to save his only grandson. So Eleni wrapped her cape around her, closed the door on the sleeping children and set out down the mountain to her father’s house.

As a child I found my grandfather a terrifying, fascinating, mysterious figure, the one model I had to teach me what it meant to be a man. I remember always being afraid in his presence, of his distant coldness and the sudden flashes of violent temper.

Kitso Haidis was a legend in the village for his cunning and for his reputation as a womanizer. In his youth he had been as handsome as the languid mountain war lords in a nineteenth-century engraving, with high cheekbones, luxuriant black hair and heavy brows above startlingly blue eyes. As he aged, his features never softened, while his hair and mustache turned entirely white. His cleverness won him respect throughout Lia and he was elected president of the village twice. He and his two brothers’ families took turns operating the southernmost mill for two years at a time, and when it was my grandfather’s turn,
business improved noticeably. When he wasn’t working the family mill, he was in demand to travel to other villages, building and repairing mills and running them, for a percentage of the profits, until they were flourishing.

My grandfather’s reputation as a Lothario only added luster to his name. In a society as rigid and devoid of privacy as the mountain villages, adultery was almost impossible and it could mean death for both parties, but everyone whispered that Kitso Haidis did more than grind flour for his women customers, and was smart enough never to get caught in the act.

Although he was the most lavish host in Lia on the occasions of his name day or the feast of his house, he was a miser and tyrant to his own family. My mother often told us how our grandmother would post her daughters as lookouts when she made herself the forbidden luxury of a cup of coffee. If Kitso suddenly appeared at the gate, Megali would toss the coffee into the fire and have the cup wiped clean before he got in the door. Kitso had taken her as a bride when she was fourteen, and for the next seventy-one years she suffered his adulteries and his brutal temper with the patience of a saint.

Although he never struck me, his only grandson, I feared and avoided him as a child. It was with great trepidation that I returned to the village in 1963 to the house of the eighty-three-year-old grandfather I hadn’t seen for fourteen years. He was exactly as I remembered him, with the same vigor and mesmerizing presence, but he seemed astonished to find me an adult, with features that mirrored his own. He was never a man who could bare his feelings, but he tried in his own way to build a bond between us, to win my admiration. I recall one afternoon when we were sitting in the village
cafenion
and several men began arguing about what was the most important quality for having success with women. “Good looks,” said one. “Money,” suggested another. “A way with words,” argued a third. Then my grandfather leaned forward with an air that silenced the room. “The one key to success with women,” he said, glancing in my direction, “is the ability to recognize those who want it.” Clearly, his reputation was well earned.

On the last night of my visit, as my grandfather and I sat in the darkness near his hearth, his face in shadow, he began to talk, and I sensed that he wanted to say something that was difficult for him. He told me that in the summer of 1916, when he was renting and operating a mill outside the village of Yeromeri, he killed a man. It was a Turkish brigand who came to him and threatened to burn his mill or worse unless he paid protection money every month, a common form of exploitation in those days. My grandfather agreed, plied the Turk with
tsipouro
, and then, when his guard was down, killed him with an ax. Working quickly, he redirected the millstream escaping from the chutes into a half-circular ditch which was there in case the machinery needed repair, pulled up the stones lining the channel and buried the Turk’s body in the red clay, where it probably still lies today, deep below the ice-cold water that turns the millstones.