Eleni (15 page)

Eleni wept with the widow Botsaris over the loss of her son. Nikola, now three and a half, was strong enough to run about in his white little gown, but she knew that without her father’s help he might be dead. On Candlemas, February 2, 1943, the “Millers’ Holiday,” she decided to thank God for the family’s deliverance by sending Olga with a full tin of olive oil to light the lamps of the Church of the Virgin.

Olive oil was almost nonexistent in the village, and Olga clutched the tin carefully to her breast as she set off down the mountain, feeling the sun on her hair and life rising in her like sap in the trees. She had not been out of the house since the Christmas liturgy, and to her fifteen-year-old eyes, everything seemed new.

The centuries-old Church of the Virgin lay below the village at the end of a long path that wound past her grandparents’ house and through a deep ravine where a spring bubbled below the ancient plane tree, the sentinel of the village. It was said that the local saint, Kosmas, had rested in the shade of this tree before continuing on to Albania and martyrdom in 1778.

Olga had only begun her walk when she was forced to stop by two men coming out of the gate of the Bollis house. The older one was Mitsi Bollis, a thin, sallow tinker whose shirt was open to reveal a tuft of gray hair rooted in fleshless skin.

Of all the people in the village, Mitsi was the last person Olga wanted to encounter, even though he was married to her mother’s cousin. He was a braggart, a petty sadist and malicious practical joker. Just two weeks before, the Gatzoyiannis family had been awakened by a terrible squawking in their henhouse. When they ventured out into the darkness, they found that someone had removed the stones under the door, letting in a fox that had already killed three hens. As they were cleaning up the mess, Olga saw a figure moving in the field below theirs in the moonlight. It was Mitsi Bollis.

Now, as she tried to walk around the tinker without acknowledging him, Olga recognized the fair-haired young man at his side, Vangeli Poulos, the son of the coffeehouse owner. He had gone to Athens to be a peddler of cheap jewelry, knives, fabrics, pins and needles, but returned to Lia, defeated by his shyness, to help in his father’s store. His eyes stared at her with a new aggressiveness over his bristling reddish mustache.

Olga bowed her head and hurried her steps, but Mitsi Bollis would not let her pass. “Where are you going, girl, with a whole can of oil?” he demanded.

She drew herself up to her full four feet, ten inches, and tried to look haughty. “To light the lamps of the Virgin.”

Mitsi winked at his companion. “There’s no Madonna!” he said. “There’s no St. Athanassios or St. Demitrios either! For that matter, there’s no God, only hungry people … So give me the oil to feed my children!”

He reached out and Olga shrank back, automatically crossing herself at the blasphemy. Then she found her voice. “My mother told me to light the Virgin’s lamps and I’m going to do it! This oil doesn’t belong to you!” She looked toward the Poulos boy for help, but Mitsi teasingly stepped in front of her and said, “It belongs to everybody.”

Bored with the game, Poulos said, “Let the girl alone, Mitsi! How do you expect her to understand? That’s all she knows. And we’re late. They’re waiting for us.”

Olga scurried off, trembling and feeling somehow mortified. And by a piece of goat’s dung like Mitsi Bollis! When she returned from her pilgrimage she complained to her mother, “You should go yell at Eugenia about Mitsi! Trying to steal our oil! And spitting in God’s eye at the same time!”

Eleni sighed and shook her head. “You don’t see how men like Mitsi have changed in the last year because you haven’t been out of the house,” she told her daughter. “The Skevis brothers are giving them guns and big words that puff them up like frogs. Next time, get out of Mitsi’s way before he sees you, just as you would with a rabid dog.”

Olga remembered the blond peddler and how his eyes had disturbed her. “Vangeli Poulos was with him.”

“He used to be a polite, shy boy,” Eleni said. “Blushing every time someone spoke to him. Now he’s like a wild man!”

When Olga encountered Mitsi Bollis and young Poulos, they were on
their way to the village square, where a tragicomic farce was unfolding in the coffee shop of the boy’s father. The star of the drama was Vangeli Kontoris, a red-faced, mud-stained field warden from the nearby village of Raveni who had been interned for his role in helping the Italians and was then released by the Germans.

Kontoris had arrived in Lia three days earlier from Filiates, settled himself at a table in Poulos’ coffeehouse and put three objects on the table in front of him: a piece of paper, a pencil and a hand grenade, which had been painted red. Then he began drinking plum
raki
.

As his complexion took on a ruddier hue from the moonshine, Kontoris began to rant at the men sitting around him. Lia had fine wire fences, he said. The Italians needed wire. He was going to note down the names of those who had wire fences for the war effort. And if anyone tried to stop him, he would blow them straight to Charon. Then he picked up the bizarre red grenade and brandished it until nearly everyone fled to the coffee shop across the way, except for the men who secretly belonged to the Skevis group of partisans. They sat and watched Kontoris and waited.

With eyes as patient as a lizard’s, Prokopi Skevis sat at a nearby table beside the tinker Nikola Koukas, the owner of the mule laden with oranges that Eleni had encountered on the road near the Kalamas. When Mitsi Bollis and young Poulos arrived at the
cafenion
, they sat down at a table near the now raucous field warden. Kontoris was serenading the patrons with a ribald sailor’s song when Prokopi called the Poulos boy to him with a lift of his eyebrows.

Prokopi, Nikola Koukas and Vangeli Poulos moved to a table farther away, and Prokopi told his two disciples that the time had come to act. He had information that Kontoris was carrying a letter to the Italians in Keramitsa, a list of the names of their comrades in the resistance group. “Tonight he’s leaving to visit his whore,” Prokopi said. “I want you two to make sure she sleeps alone.” Koukas looked grim, but Vangeli Poulos sat up straighter, flushed with the honor of being chosen for the first execution.

The sun was setting when Kontoris left Lia, and Koukas and Vangeli Poulos were already hiding in a field overlooking the road he would take. So intent were they on their mission that they didn’t see Vasilo Economou, the widowed daughter of Father Zisis, working in a neighboring field. But she was a witness to what took place that evening.

The two guerrillas heard Kontoris before they saw him, singing Italian
cantatas
in anticipation of the romance ahead. Koukas’ Mannlicher rifle was aimed at the spot, but when the lurching figure appeared, the barrel of the gun began to quiver and Koukas froze. Fighting the Italians in the battlefield was one thing, but ambushing a man was something he had never done before.

Seeing his failure of nerve, Vangeli Poulos eagerly wrenched the rifle out of Koukas’ grasp and squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet into Kontoris’
stomach which knocked him off the road and into a nearby field. When they got to him, he was trying to hold his intestines in place and crawl at the same time.

When he finally lay still, they searched his body but found no list, only a handful of Italian coins and a bloodstained picture of Mussolini. The red grenade turned out to be a harmless war souvenir that had been fashioned into a cigarette box.

When the corpse was discovered, no one in Lia was sorry, least of all those who had wire fences. Soon everyone knew who had killed Kontoris, and Vangeli Poulos was offered many free drinks at the coffeehouses. He drank more than he could handle and was often heard spouting propaganda about “the cause,” but the villagers smiled indulgently. The warriors of the glorious War of Independence had been the same: hard-drinking and fearless.

The next day the arrival of a stranger at Prokopi Skevis’ table in the coffeehouse set the Liotes to speculating that something else was going to happen. The man was a pockmarked young teacher from the village of Kokina named Evangelos Doupis. He was Prokopi Skevis’ protégé and had been secretly organizing resistance groups in the lower Mourgana villages. But now Prokopi had summoned him.

On a moonless night in early March, as the village slept, twenty men moved about in the darkness of their houses, dressing in pieces of unmatched uniforms and loading old guns and muskets. They cast no shadows as they crept down the ravine toward the ancient plane tree. When they were all gathered, they climbed noiselessly up the other side and came out just beyond the village square at the two-room police station.

As his men surrounded the building, Prokopi shouted. Lamps flickered on inside and within seconds the four constables came out, one with his hands raised, one still buttoning his pants. Their sergeant was in uniform and his face showed no emotion. While the other three constables shivered in the cold, Prokopi took the sergeant aside. After some argument, the two men appeared to reach an agreement. The constable slowly walked back into the police station, then emerged holding four rifles which he handed to Prokopi.

The next morning as Olga was milking the she-goat, Kanta scattering crumbs to the chickens and Eleni stirring a pot of corn-meal porridge for breakfast, there was a great clanging of the bells of Holy Trinity. Everyone froze and listened, wondering if the Germans had come at last. The wind brought them a shout: “People of Lia! Everyone to the Alonia at once!”

The Alonia, which was what Liotes called the village square, literally means “threshing floor,” and the spot once served that purpose, but because it was the only flat piece of land within Lia, shaded on one side by a giant plane tree, it had become the hub of village life, where dances and important meetings were held and gossip exchanged.

Eleni herded the children into the house and warned Olga not to open
the gate to anyone. With a shawl over her head and shoulders, she joined the frightened crowd hurrying to the square.

What she and the other villagers saw as they gathered on the threshing floor in front of the Church of the Holy Trinity was neither Germans nor Italians nor Chams but, to their relief, a line of twenty familiar faces—local boys of Skevis’ band all decked out in a motley assortment of military uniforms. Prokopi Skevis and Nikola Koukas had on the faded gray uniforms they had worn in the Italian campaign, but Vangeli Poulos was wearing an oversized green fatigue jacket that had clearly come from an Italian corpse, and Mitsi Bollis had a black Italian beret perched at a rakish angle. Eleni noticed that only her cousin Costa Haidis made no attempt at a uniform.

Half the men held weapons, some nearly antiques, but the center of all eyes was the flag proudly held by Vangeli Poulos. It was the familiar white cross on a blue field, but someone had stitched the mysterious letters, ELAS, across the middle.

Many of the Liotes, relieved to see that the enemy had not come, smiled at the sight of the grim-faced band, but no one scoffed aloud, for all the village knew what they had done to the collaborator Kontoris. Besides, the four constables of the village were standing among the ragged group of rebels.

When Prokopi was satisfied that most of the villagers were present, he climbed up on a chair and scanned the weather-beaten faces before him. “People of Lia!” he shouted. “Today the brave young men of our village have taken up arms against the invaders. We will not lay down our guns until they are driven out of our land and we are free!”

At first the crowd stared at him skeptically. The ragtag band before them hardly looked capable of taking on the Germans. But relatives of the twenty men began to punctuate Prokopi’s rhetoric with shouts of “Long Live Greece!” and clapping their callused hands.

Prokopi described the Greek Popular Liberation Army and talked of a democratic new order, based on justice and equality for all workingmen. He explained that ELAS now ruled Lia, that every able-bodied man in the village would be part of its reserve forces, that even the constables appointed by the traitorous collaboration government had crossed the line to fight for freedom.

Prokopi scanned the crowd and saw doubt still lingering on many faces. “As you know, I’m a teacher,” he shouted, challenging them. “After the war is over, I’ll be a civil servant with an assured salary month after month and a pension in my old age. I’m not a tinker like you, wandering from one town to another for crusts of bread, scrubbing pots until your hands bleed, sleeping in shacks and alleys. It’s not for me, but for you that we all embark on this struggle! To put shoes on your feet, food in your children’s mouths! We are fighting to change your life, to raise you up from poverty and humiliation, to make you men!”

There was a moment of silence, then a thunderclap of cheers. Prokopi studied the faces he knew so well. Some eyes were wet. He could see they all were with him now. He had conquered his own village with his words, and the rest of Greece would follow.

He raised his hands for silence. “Be warned!” he glowered at them with the look he used on unruly students. “We will not tolerate opposition! The movement is prepared to take harsh steps against all those who betray it! You will hear of others who call themselves resistance fighters, but they are collaborators and traitors!”

Behind him, his men began stamping their feet and shouting “Down with traitors!” Although they didn’t understand that he was referring to Zervas’ guerrilla army, the crowd took up the chant, warmed by their shared longing for freedom and their loathing for those who had stripped them of their livelihood, their food, their self-respect. Prokopi let them chant and stamp until they were ready to kill anyone he named as a traitor. Then he gestured once more for silence. “Now that the army of ELAS has liberated Lia, you will be governed by a committee of your own people, and it seems appropriate to me that the honor of heading it should go to my colleague and your schoolmaster, Minas Stratis.”

He climbed down from the chair and pushed through the crowd to throw his arm around the shoulders of Minas, who was shaking his head, disconcerted by suddenly finding himself in the spotlight.