Eleni (13 page)

My grandfather never told anyone about the murder, unlike my uncle Foto, who often bragged about killing the Turk who insulted his wife. I understood that he was telling me the story as a kind of peace offering. There had been only one other person who knew his secret, he said. My mother, a nine-year-old girl at the time, had been visiting him at the rented mill, sleeping in the loft, and saw the killing. “She never told anyone,” my grandfather said quietly in the darkness, “but I could always see it in her eyes.”

We sat in silence as I considered his revelation. I knew how difficult it was for him to expose himself to me even this much. Before he died four years later, at the age of eighty-seven, he never apologized for his treatment of my mother and his grandchildren, or spoke of his feelings about her execution. Although he would never admit it, I knew that even an affirmed cynic like my grandfather subscribed to the universally held village belief that God often visits the sins of the father on the children.

With his confession, he had also given me the key to understanding the thorny relationship he and my mother shared throughout their lives. Every time he looked into his daughter’s eyes he read there not only fear but also an unspoken accusation. She understood him better than any other person on earth, and he could not forget it. Her knowledge and her silence must have been a constant rebuke to him.

When Eleni entered her father’s door on that snowy evening in 1941 and saw him waiting hostilely to learn what had brought her, she tried to sound calm and businesslike. “We have the milk from the goats,” she told him, “but the corn will last only another month. The six goats are all we have left. I know Uncle Yiorgi has the mill now, but perhaps if you spoke to him, he’d lend us some flour, enough to stay alive until the mails open and Christos can pay him back.”

Kitso listened in silence, frowning. He could see it hurt her to beg, and sympathy, mixed with knowledge that he could do nothing, boiled up into anger. “Yiorgi has five children plus Mitros’ orphans to support!” he shouted. “Fourteen Haidis mouths to feed off the mill, and business down to nothing! Once you married into the Gatzoyiannis clan it became their responsibility to keep you alive, not mine! If your husband can’t help you, let his brother Foto feed you!”

Eleni bowed her head, knowing she was defeated. Her father was right and she had no hope of assistance from Foto. Only a week before, her brother-in-law had passed their gate carrying a sack full of quail; when she asked for one to make soup for the baby he refused her. Her husband had sent money to support Foto and his large family ever since 1910 when Foto was in jail for killing the Turk, and now he denied her a bird the size of a sparrow.

Eleni would not let her father see her desperation. She sat silent for a
moment, thinking. There was one option left if her strength didn’t fail her. “I’ll take the things Christos gave me and sell them in Albania!” she said defiantly.

While Greece was starving, Albania was still well supplied with goods, because Mussolini had made it an Italian protectorate. On the other side of the mountains, the Albanians had plenty of corn which they were willing to trade to the Greeks in exchange for valuables. The most destitute women in Lia had been cheating starvation by walking two days to the sea at Igoumenitsa to gather salt, then bringing back as much as they could carry on their backs, and climbing over the snow-covered mountains to the landlocked Albanians, who would exchange an equal weight of corn for salt. But only the most desperate and strongest women took this expedient because the mountains were death traps of brigands, wolves and snowdrifts that had been growing since November.

Only the week before, Eleni had seen the frozen body of her neighbor Sotirena Papachristo dragged past her gate, the head thumping on the stones, mouth frozen open, eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. Sotirena and her twenty-two-year-old son George had set out for Albania, each carrying fifty pounds of salt, and on the way back, loaded down with corn, they became lost in a snowstorm and huddled together all night under a stand of pine trees. In the morning the boy awoke to find his mother stiff and blue. His cries roused the villagers, who rushed up the mountain, wrapped her in a blanket and dragged her down the path to her house. Eleni followed the procession into the woman’s good chamber, bare except for a rough wooden table, on which they laid her while her three youngest children shrank from the sight of their mother. When the women turned Sotirena to close her eyes, a gargling moan broke from her throat, and her son fainted. The women rushed to massage Sotirena’s hands and feet, but as soon as they touched her they knew she was now dead beyond question. The sound had been her soul leaving her body, they agreed. Three days later the villagers saw crows circling over the spot where Sotirena had dropped her bags of corn. They gathered the kernels and dried them in the stone oven so her children could have the food she died bringing them.

Eleni thought of Sotirena’s face in death and shuddered, but her father’s angry refusal to help had resolved her to follow the dead woman’s path over the Albanian border.

Kitso stared in shock at her words, then began to mock his daughter. Three years ago she was too ill to walk, and now she was planning to climb through the snow to Albania. Wouldn’t it be quicker to jump into the ravine and have done with it? No one had told her to have five children!

The more he taunted her, the more determined Eleni became. If it was the only way to feed her children, then she would find the physical strength somehow to climb the mountain as soon as the Christmas holidays were over. She stood up and put on her cape, then stormed out the door, her eyes as hard as her father’s.

“Yes, get yourself killed!” Kitso shouted after her. “Leave five orphans! Then who will be stuck with putting food into their mouths?”

In the good chamber of her house, the room reserved for special occasions, where the family’s wealth was displayed, Eleni sorted out the possessions that she might be able to trade for corn.

The Gatzoyiannis’ good chamber was more splendid than any other in Lia, dominated by the great brass bed, which was used only when Christos was in residence. In the eastern corner, in the glass-and-wood family iconostasis, a garnet-colored lamp burned before the figure of the Virgin frozen in a presentiment of sorrow, holding her Child in dark, narrow hands, the ruby glass and her silver ornamentation scattering stars of light on the whitewashed walls.

Eleni picked up the engraved golden pitcher from Constantinople. On a wooden table nearby were the sewing machine and her beloved gramophone, which each would bring two hundred pounds of corn if she could carry them.

From her dowry chest Eleni removed the filigreed silver belt buckle and necklaces of coins from her wedding costume. They were folded between linen sheets and thick American blankets, the only ones in the village. She took out a warm peacock-blue blanket and looked at it thoughtfully, struck by an idea. Then she reached for her scissors.

Two days before Christmas, Eleni told the children that there would be no roast kid for the feast. Yiorgi Mitros, who owned the mill above their house, had agreed to buy the twin baby goats in exchange for corn flour. The news was greeted with a general outburst of misery. Fotini wailed the loudest, because the kids had been her pets, but Eleni grimly tied a rope around their necks, and ignoring the bedlam, led them up the mountain. When she returned from the mill with two heavy bags of corn flour, no one spoke to her.

The day before Christmas was haunted by memories. On Christmas Eve in the past, Eleni would set the table for the next day, which was also her husband’s name day, when half the village would come to eat and pay their compliments. There would be the sweet Christ’s bread, which took nearly a full day to make and decorate, a laurel leaf finishing each arm of the cross. The bread was set in the place of honor, surrounded by honey, fruit, walnuts, wine and a minimum of nine cooked dishes for good luck. But this Christmas Eve, no one mentioned the Christ’s bread or the holiday ahead.

Only one ragged trio of urchins had come by to sing the
kalanda
in the doorway, to the accompaniment of their metal triangles. “In the blessed hour, Christ is born, as the new moon,” their shrill voices caroled in the softly falling snow, and because she had nothing else to give them, Eleni put the last of the walnuts into their hands. Her children fell asleep early,
huddled together under their
velenzes
, wearing, as always, the same clothes they had worn all day long.

On Christmas morning Olga awoke to find a brilliant blue dress hanging on her wall hook, made from the American blanket, complete with three black stripes pieced out of one of Eleni’s old aprons. Eleni had even made Olga and Kanta new kerchiefs, cut from the linen sheets, fringed and dyed burgundy with the root of the alizarin tree.

Olga tore off her black dress and buttoned up the new one over her shift. It wasn’t velvet, but it fit snugly over her budding bosom and flared out at the skirt, making her waist look even smaller. She tied the wine-colored kerchief over her long braids and knotted it at the nape of the neck, letting a daring inch of auburn hair show at the temples.

The other girls marveled as Olga twisted this way and that, trying to see the total effect in the small hand mirror.

“I’m beautiful!” she announced, pirouetting in the center of the room. “Every single person in church will be staring at me!”

“At your feet, probably!” retorted Kanta.

Olga looked down. Her toes were visible through the holes in her flat leather shoes—the last pair Eleni had bought before the war.

“I don’t see why you won’t be sensible and put on the new
patikia
your uncle made you!” Eleni complained.

At her mother’s reprimand, Olga raised her chin and clicked her tongue “no.” “I’m not going to church on Christmas Day wearing rubber sandals!” she said. “These shoes may be full of holes, but at least they’re real shoes!”

Eleni sighed and said nothing. Olga was becoming far too spirited for a well-brought-up young girl.

The bells of the Church of the Holy Trinity called the faithful out into a heavy snowstorm. Eleni carried Nikola wrapped in her shawl, followed by the girls. Despite the angry scene with her father, she stopped by to congratulate him on his name day, because it was his festival as well as Christos’, but when they reached her parents’ house, Megali said that Kitso had left on a mysterious errand two days before, revealing only that he was going to Lista, a village three miles to the southeast.

The path to the church was treacherous, flooded in several spots by swollen streams, but as they approached the square, the windows of Holy Trinity glowed invitingly through the fallen snow. Inside, the air was heavy with incense and the warmth of many bodies. The men and boys stood toward the front, the old and infirm leaning on their elbows against the arms of the seatless miserere stalls that lined the sides of the nave. The women and small children stood at the back, watching as each new arrival lit a candle and kissed the icon of the Nativity.

Father Zisis chanted the ancient verses of St. Basil, but few members of the congregation paid strict attention. They were whispering together, catching up on neighbors they hadn’t seen since the first snows, and eying
the finery that the others had managed to assemble on this bitterest of Christmases.

Olga had been right; she was the center of attention. Men in the front of the church turned around to stare at the flushed cheeks and downcast eyes under the burgundy kerchief, her white skin set off by a dress as blue as the Virgin’s robes. Father Zisis frowned at the distraction and chanted louder, the altar boys swinging their censers faster in accompaniment.

Olga crossed herself as frequently as the most pious woman in the church, and only occasionally stole a glance at the congregation to measure the impression she was making. But her moment of glory was soon eclipsed by the arrival of a family who were strangers to most of the assemblage. As they entered the narthex, even the priest turned around to look. A buzz arose like the sound of a thousand bees.

At the head of the group was a middle-aged woman in black leaning on the arm of a thin young man with a face the color of parchment. It was the two girls behind them, though, who made the congregation stare. They wore printed dresses of a clinging fabric, visible under light cloth coats. It was their hair that attracted all eyes. Outside of the big cities no one in the village had ever seen women with uncovered bobbed hair, but the curls of these two swung shamelessly above their shoulders, bare beneath the eyes of Christ the Ail-Powerful, who glowered down from the vault of the central dome.

The younger of the two young women was pretty and blond, and she returned the disapproving stares of the congregation defiantly. The Gatzoyiannis children sucked in their breath and stared with a mixture of fascination and horror at the girl. Eleni saw that the newcomers wore no shoes, only sodden knee-high knitted stockings. Olga noticed only that all the men were no longer looking at her.

Before the church service was over, everyone knew that the strangers were the widow Alexandra Botsaris and three of her five children. The woman’s husband, the tinker Vasilis Botsaris, had taken his family from Lia to Athens eight years before but had died almost immediately. The boy, Yiorgos, now twenty-two, had contracted tuberculosis fighting in the Italian campaign and was evicted from the hospital when the food ran out. The widow Botsaris had brought her children back to escape from the famine in Athens, but there was nothing left for them in the village; even their deserted house had been turned into a stable.

After church Eleni took her family over to speak to her old friend. Yiorgos was coughing badly, and the two girls, Demetroula, twenty, and Angeliki, eighteen, were shivering in their thin city clothes.

The two families walked home together. On the way Eleni and the children stopped at the Botsaris house. They were appalled to see that not a pane of glass was intact; the corners of the hovel were heaped with dirty hay. Snow drifted through the holes in the walls. The only furnishings were sleeping
velenzes
. Alexandra told Eleni how they had left everything—
clothing, pots, pieces of furniture—in Yannina when they could no longer hitch a ride and were forced to set out on foot over the two-day journey from the provincial capital, sleeping in hay sheds, their feet so swollen they couldn’t force them into their shoes anymore.