Eleni (14 page)

She described the horrors of the famine in Athens, the anonymous children lying dead at their doorstep, her daughters walking ten miles out of town to steal greens from other people’s fields at night. There was not an olive, not so much as a raisin left on the vines for miles beyond the city, she said. When the children were given a loaf of bread by a sympathetic baker in Yannina, their stomachs were so unused to food that they rolled on the floor with stomach cramps.

“But you have nothing here, Alexandra!” Eleni exclaimed. “The house is a ruin, you have no crops, no wood, no food—how will you survive?”

“I’d rather my children died in Lia than in Athens,” the widow replied. “I’ve heard that women here are selling salt to the Albanians for corn. When I’m stronger, I’ll walk to the sea.”

Eleni saw hope in the sunken face. She took her friend’s hand. “Then we can climb the mountain together,” she said.

When they crossed their own threshold, a tantalizing aroma from the kitchen greeted the Gatzoyiannis family. Eleni remembered the surprise and went to the fireplace, where she brushed away the glowing coals heaped over the
gastra
, a flat, covered copper pan. She lifted the lid, and the scent of meat rose like incense. Glykeria began squealing with excitement and the others ran to see. The pan was full of steaming
briami
—a mixture of boiled ricelike
kofto
and mountain herbs, studded with thick chunks of liver.

“Christ and the Virgin Mary!” exulted Glykeria. “Meat! Where did you get it?”

Eleni smiled. “I told Yiorgi Mitros, when he slaughtered the kids, to save me the liver and pay me that much less corn.”

The children ate with their hands, sitting cross-legged around the low table, stuffing bits of the savory stew into their mouths. When they were finished, Eleni’s plate was nearly untouched.

“I’ll eat that if you don’t want it!” Glykeria and Kanta said in unison.

Eleni shook her head. “Today is the day when every house prepares a plate for the stranger who is the Christ child in disguise,” she said. “This is His portion, and I’m going to send it to the Botsaris family.”

A chorus of protests drowned out her voice. The first meat they’d seen all year! Giving it away to strangers!

Eleni silenced them with a look. “Olga’s going to take it to them now,” she declared, in a tone that permitted no argument. She watched Olga flush an angry red, then added, “As soon as you’ve put on your new
patikia.”

New Year’s Eve passed without the usual fortunetelling rituals because no one had the heart to ask about the future. Shortly after, on January 6, came
the annual celebration of the Epiphany, the blessing of the waters. Father Zisis made his rounds of the village, sanctifying each house by sprinkling the corners with a sprig of sweet basil dipped in holy water.

After the priest’s blessing, Eleni set out to make name day calls, for Epiphany—
ta fata
—is the feast of every Fotios and Fotini, and Eleni intended to visit Foto Gatzoyiannis and her young second cousin, Fotis Haidis, who lived in the other half of her parents’ divided house. Megali was there already, looking worried. Kitso had sent a message, she said, demanding that Eleni come at once to meet him in Lista.

Leaving the children with their grandmother, Eleni immediately set out on the two-hour walk over the mountain paths. She found her father sitting in the main coffeehouse in Lista with a grizzled old man whom he introduced as the miller Yiori Stolis. Somewhat flushed with plum
raki
, Kitso informed Eleni that she could give up her plan of walking to Albania. Stolis had agreed to rent Kitso his mill on the Kefalovriso River in exchange for fifty okas of flour a month.

Light-headed with relief, Eleni sat down in a chair in that exclusively male bastion and began to thank the old man for his kindness, but he waved away her gratitude. “No, it’s your father who’s done
me
a favor!” he said. “The mill has been idle since the Germans came. The whole region is crawling with bandits! I was afraid for my life.”

Eleni turned to look at Kitso, who got up abruptly and ordered her to follow him. He would take her to Kefalovriso and give her a sack of corn flour to take home, he said. She should come back with the mule every month to get more.

On the way, struggling to keep up with her father’s stride, Eleni worried aloud that he was risking his life. “You’ll be robbed and we’ll find you dead one morning!” she said.

Kitso shrugged. “You know well enough that I can protect myself against thugs!”

It was the closest he had ever come to acknowledging the secret they shared. Eleni had never spoken of the murder of the Turkish brigand, and now that he referred to it obliquely, she fell silent. As they neared the turnoff to Kefalovriso, she awkwardly began to thank him for finding a way to feed her children.

“I don’t give charity and I don’t take charity,” Kitso replied curtly. “I’ll keep your family alive until the war is over, and in exchange, your husband will support me and your mother in our old age.”

Eleni protested that she would do that anyway, but he cut her off. “I don’t want any favors. This is a business arrangement!”

As the pair approached the mill, walking along the well-traveled road that led to the Kalamas and on toward Yannina, they encountered a large gray mule, plodding head down in the opposite direction, loaded with two huge baskets full of oranges. Eleni reached for its reins, but her father pulled her back.

“It must have gotten away from someone!” she protested.

“Don’t touch it!” snapped her father. He saw her questioning look and continued reluctantly, “It’s Griva, the mule of the tinker Nikola Koukas. It knows the way back to Lia.”

Eleni was afraid that something had happened to Koukas. Perhaps he had been set upon by brigands.

Her father knew better. He had seen the traffic along this road during the days he was working at the new mill. “Leave it alone. There’s something in those baskets besides oranges,” he advised her. “That’s why Koukas is letting the mule go on ahead of him through the Italian checkpoints. If they search the baskets and find things that shouldn’t be there, they can’t connect it with him.”

“What things?” Eleni asked, mystified.

“Guns. Messages. Who knows?”

Eleni insisted that he tell her what he was hinting at.

“Better to be ignorant,” he snorted, but finally he gave in. “Prokopi Skevis is sneaking around, talking to fools like Koukas, filling them with ideas about armed resistance and open revolution,” he said. “It’s an epidemic! Costa, my own brother’s son, is one of them. They hold meetings in our mill! Idiots from all over the Mourgana. Prokopi calls them and they come.”

That was the first Eleni had heard of it and her reaction was to worry that the young men would get themselves killed, leaving their wives and mothers a bitter cup to drink. As they walked farther, she spied two tiny figures climbing the ribbon of road that curved below them. They were Nikola Koukas and Prokopi Skevis following far behind the mule.

“What did I tell you?” Kitso exploded. He warned Eleni that they should leave the road and take an overland path to the mill rather than encounter them. Before turning away, he extended his palm toward them, fingers spread, in the familiar imprecatory gesture. “May they go to the devil!” he muttered. “They’re going to bring the Germans down on us like the ten plagues of Egypt. Any fool can throw a stone into the sea, but once he does, a hundred wise men can’t pull it out.”

One June morning in 1942, the peasants of the small village of Domnitsa, 185 miles northwest of Athens, were startled to see a detachment of fifteen heavily armed men marching into their main square behind a bugler and the Greek flag, the sun reflecting on the bandoliers across their chests and the damascened daggers thrust into their belts. Their leader, a short, husky man with a fierce black beard and the eyes of a hunter, stepped forward to address the astonished villagers: “Patriots! I am Aris Velouchiotis, colonel of artillery. Starting today, I am raising the banner of revolt against the forces occupying our beloved country! The handful of men you see before you will soon become an army of thousands.”

He was not telling the truth about his name or military rank, but his prediction about his little band was accurate. It would grow into a vast resistance force, the Greek Popular Liberation Army, known by its Greek initials, ELAS. And
“Kapetan
Aris,” its thirty-six-year-old leader, would become a legend throughout Greece, electrifying the peasants with his daring, annoying his Communist Party bosses by his tendency to make independent decisions.

Aris was really Athanasios Klaras, a lawyer’s son and agronomy student. An active Communist by the time he was drafted, he was sent in 1925 to the disciplinary company at Kalpaki, Epiros. Nearby was the school at Vela, where the Skevis brothers from Lia had won places through the machinations of their father, and where they were indoctrinated by Communist soldiers from the camp. Aris spent most of the next fourteen years in prison or island exile but was released in 1939 after signing a “declaration of repentance,” for which the hard-line Communists would never quite forgive him.

As Aris was to become the hero of the left, his opposite number, the resistance hero of the right, was a portly fifty-one-year-old retired army
colonel named Napoleon Zervas who had a weakness for gambling, drink and good food that hardly fitted the Spartan ideal of a guerrilla leader. On July 23, 1942, a month after Aris’ debut in Domnitsa, Zervas left Athens to form his own resistance army in the mountains of his native Epiros. He soon had grown a beard as thick as Aris’ and collected a small but tough force that persisted throughout the occupation, while other non-Communist resistance groups were crushed by Aris’ leftist ELAS. Zervas called his rightist army EDES, the initials of the National Democratic Greek League.

The Allies showed little interest in either ELAS or EDES until the fall of 1942 when they realized they needed Greek help to blow up the railway link between Germany and Piraeus, the life line of General Rommel’s forces in North Africa. The most vulnerable point was the viaduct over the Gorgopotamos, the “rapid river” at the foot of Mount Parnassos. On October 1, a small group of British commandos was dropped into Greece by parachute. They approached ELAS bands in the area to engage the large force of Italians guarding the bridge while they set off the explosives to blow it up. Aris, however, avoided meeting the British altogether on orders from the Communist Party, so the deputy leader of the British mission marched a hundred miles over mountain passes to find Zervas, who agreed to help and hurried to the Gorgopotamos with sixty men. Suspecting that Zervas’ EDES would get all the credit for this important mission, Aris decided to ignore the orders of his Communist superiors and joined in with over a hundred fighters. On the night of November 25, as ELAS and EDES guerrillas battled the eighty Italians guarding both sides of the bridge, twelve British saboteurs blew a seventy-foot span into the gorge far below, interrupting the main German supply route to North Africa for three critical months.

This triumph was the first and last time the two resistance groups ever fought together against the enemy. For the next three years they concentrated on annihilating each other, each group determined to take control of Greece when the war was over.

W
HILE RESISTANCE GROUPS
of guerrillas were organizing in the mountain villages of Greece, Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her children were surviving the famine thanks to the bags of flour that her father sent regularly from Kefalovriso. Others in Lia were not so fortunate, and the death knell of Holy Trinity became a familiar sound.

The widow Botsaris and her children managed to stay alive through the first winter by begging and borrowing food and trading copper pots for corn in Albania. By the autumn of 1942, the two Botsaris girls had found work picking olives near the Albanian port of Chimara. Their brother, Yiorgos, still suffering from tuberculosis, walked over the mountains to visit them and died in the arms of Angeliki on September 26, 1942.