Eleni (16 page)

Minas had answered the call of the church bells in such haste that he had forgotten his cravat and his watch chain, and his hair was standing up in tufts. He whispered urgently to Prokopi that he wanted to take up arms and fight, not stay home and chair a committee, but Prokopi refused his protestations. “You’re needed here,” he said with finality. It was only later that Minas realized Prokopi knew it was inevitable that as committee chairman, adjudicating every disagreement, he would become one of the most unpopular men in the village.

The emergence of the ELAS guerrillas, called
andartes
in Greek, and their takeover of the village gave the people of Lia a new purpose and hope in the dark hours of the occupation. Villagers who could not even read or write found themselves with important jobs: collecting cheese to sell for money to buy black-market guns, conscripting mules for the guerrillas’ use, levying taxes on each farmer’s harvest. There were committees for administration, security, justice, supplies and recruitment, and many who had never thought of joining the resistance were flattered to be put in charge of them. The teen-agers were organized into a youth league to assist the guerrillas, and even the children were drafted into the “Little Eagles” and carried messages from one village to another.

Just as Prokopi had promised, collaborators and traitors were dealt with swiftly and severely. Kontoris had been the first, but other bullet-riddled bodies were soon found in gullies throughout the mountains. For the first time in centuries, brigands stopped plundering the Mourgana mountain
villages and peasants could travel between them without fear, holding papers issued by the ELAS committee in each village.

Although no direct attacks were made on the Italian outposts by the Skevis group of
andartes
, they helped another ELAS group just on the other side of the Kalamas River drive off a company of Italians and Chams. This victory, coupled with the murders of collaborators and brigands, so unnerved the Italians that they retreated from their positions at Keramitsa and Aghies Pantes (“All Saints”), back to regional headquarters in Filiates. The Mourgana villagers found themselves out of the shadow of the invaders, if not yet free, and gave the credit to ELAS.

In the spring of 1943, just as the village began to hum with new hope and purpose and the first almond and Judas trees burst into bloom, the families of the Perivoli were saddened by the return of Angeliki and Constantina Botsaris, carrying between them the emaciated figure of their sister on a wooden stretcher. Demetroula had fallen ill working in the Albanian olive fields, and the girls carried her back on foot. As Demetroula lay in the family’s decrepit house, she recognized no one and clutched each visitor with a hand of transparent thinness, begging for water. Within twenty-four hours of her arrival in the village, the bells of St. Demetrios tolled her death.

The atmosphere in the Botsaris house after the funeral was as bitter as the barley coffee the mourners sipped while they asked repose for Demetroula’s soul. Angeliki’s indomitable spirit seemed eclipsed, like her bobbed golden hair under the black kerchief, and her mother didn’t reply to the condolences tendered to her. Everyone left as soon as they decently could.

Eleni Gatzoyiannis set off up the mountain in the company of her destitute neighbor Anastasia Yakou and her twenty-year-old daughter, Stavroula. Although Stavroula had grown into one of the tallest and handsomest girls in the village, the desertion of her father, who still lived among the brothels of Kalambaka, and her family’s poverty left her small hope of finding a husband.

Mitsi Bollis and his wife caught up with the three women, all headed in the same direction. Mitsi remarked with a sigh that it was a shame Demetroula didn’t live long enough to reap the fruits of the revolution. “It’s the poor, like the Botsaris family, who will benefit most from our struggle,” he opined.

“What benefits?” scoffed Anastasia Yakou, who shared Eleni’s estimation of Mitsi. “I’m as hungry as ever! Hungrier, in fact! You’ve requisitioned two days of our goat’s milk to make cheese for the guerrillas, but you haven’t given me or my girls a bean yet.”

“Everyone has to sacrifice to build a new order!” Mitsi exclaimed. “Think of something besides your stomach! Look at what we’ve already accomplished!”

He recited the list of brigands and collaborators eliminated by the ELAS
guerrillas and added that ELAS was freeing the young men of the Mourgana from the vices of drinking, card playing and fornication. ELAS had already shot some of its own soldiers for dishonoring women. The guerrillas were constantly warned that to build the new order they must keep themselves pure. Inspired by his theme, Mitsi said, “You remember that collaborator Demetri Koulioutas, who was executed in Yeromeri? He wasn’t just a traitor. The thing he was charged with and convicted for was raping his own sister!”

The women’s faces showed their disgust. Only Eleni looked skeptical. “His own sister?” she asked. “How could someone from these mountains do such a thing? Did his sister testify against him at the trial?”

“Of course not!” Bollis said with a shrug. “He was her brother, after all, no matter what he had done.”

“Did he confess?” Eleni persisted.

“The questions you ask, woman!” Bollis laughed. “Who would confess to such a crime? But everyone in his village knew it. ‘Wipe this stench from us!’ they begged us. His judges were a priest, an army officer and the schoolteacher Doupis. Do you think men like that would make a mistake?”

Stavroula Yakou nodded. “It must have been true,” she said. “Otherwise the guerrillas wouldn’t have killed him.”

Her mother was less impressed. “You’d better pray that kind of justice doesn’t come to Lia, Mitsi!” she laughed. “If your fate hung on what everyone in the village said about you, you’d be dead a long time ago!”

Offended, Mitsi hurried his pace and left the women behind, as his wife raced to keep up. After the Bollis couple had turned off toward their own gate, Eleni reflected to Anastasia Yakou, “It’s true, they’ve rid the mountains of brigands, and the Italians have withdrawn from the Mourgana, but so many killings so quickly! With every execution it becomes easier.”

Anastasia agreed, but her daughter said nothing and stored Eleni’s remark away in her mind, as a squirrel hoards a nut against the winter ahead.

On Holy Saturday there were few families who could afford to slaughter a kid for Easter and hang the skinned carcass from the rafters, but Eleni paid her neighbor Tassos Bartzokis in corn flour for a share of the goat he and his wife would be roasting. The whole family gathered around to watch Tassos prepare it for the spit while the women cleaned the intestines for the spicy kebabs called
kokoretsi
. While they were working, there was a commotion on the road below. Everyone hurried toward the sound and found twenty-seven neatly stepping soldiers entering the village from the direction of Babouri. After the first shock they recognized the invaders as their own men, led by Prokopi Skevis, but splendidly transformed since the day they seized the police station.

Now, instead of motley pieces of clothing, they all wore new gray uniforms set off with gleaming bandoliers crisscrossed over their chests. On
their heads, tilted to the right, were soft two-pointed hats, embellished with a small brass badge reading
ELAS
. Each guerrilla carried a new Mannlicher or Mauser rifle, except for Vangeli Poulos, ruddy with pride, who had a Hotchkiss machine gun strapped across his shoulders. The village children ran to fall in behind the splendid
andartes
. It was the finest parade they had ever seen.

That night every person in the village, even the unmarried maidens like Olga Gatzoyiannis, crowded into the Church of the Holy Trinity, hushed with expectation. The stentorian voice of Father Zisis, aided by the clear tenor of Minas Stratis chanting the responses, poured out through the open windows over the heads of the latecomers who had to stand in the churchyard. The bier of Christ had been covered with flowers, which the village urchins crawled under for good luck, and everyone held a new candle, ready to receive the holy flame from the priest at the moment of the Resurrection.

It was an ancient drama, but it stirred the passions no less every Easter. Out of the tomblike silence of the darkened church the priest, at the stroke of midnight, would emerge from the Royal Doors, splendid in his white vestments, incense curling around him, a single lit candle in his hand. “Come and receive the light!” he would call to the congregation as the bells pealed out the news that Christ had risen. The village boys were ready to set off firecrackers in the courtyard as the flame traveled from candle to candle, and each worshiper would wend his way home, sheltering the flame from the wind so that he could inscribe a new cross on the ceiling of his house with the candle’s smoke, to mark yet another triumphant return from the dead.

But shortly before midnight, as the crowd waited tensely on Holy Saturday of 1943, there was a commotion in the churchyard that soon spread into the nave itself, and the congregation parted to let the band of
andartes
push through. One of the guerrillas stepped forward. He wore a gleaming Beretta rifle over his shoulder and a chestnut mustache embellished his thin mouth.

There was a communal gasp as the guerrilla climbed the two steps to the bishop’s throne, a canopied wooden chair with a miter carved on top, which was off-limits to any ordinary mortal, even Father Zisis. It was kept faithfully dusted and polished in the hope that one day the mighty Bishop Spyridon of Yannina might pay a visit to his flock in Lia.

With one movement, everyone looked at Father Zisis to see his reaction to the desecration of the bishop’s throne on this holiest of days, but the priest watched with resignation as the uniformed guerrilla cleared his throat and began to address the congregation. He only spoke for a moment, in the resonant voice of a professor. On this high holy day, he said, he wished to invoke the dedication of the people of Lia to their most holy cause—the liberation of Greece from the tyrant. “If you are wholeheartedly with us, ready to spill your blood for our sacred liberty, then we cannot be defeated!” he concluded. The congregation stirred and looked again at their priest, not
certain whether it was proper to applaud in church. Like many of the other women, Eleni crossed herself and whispered a prayer.

The next day, Easter Sunday, the village drew together in an outburst of thanksgiving at having survived another year of hunger and war. Even the poorest managed to collect a few eggs and dye them red. In the afternoon the Liotes again flooded into the church for the service of the second resurrection, celebrating the rebirth every Christian will experience because of Christ’s sacrifice. It was an ancient service of love and ended with everyone embracing his neighbor, exchanging the glad news: “Christ is risen!” “He is risen indeed!”

As the greetings faded away, the moment of brotherhood was shattered by a guttural scream, a male bellow of pain coming from the schoolhouse next door. Eleni reached out to pull her children close to her, but Glykeria was already at the head of the crowd racing across the churchyard toward the sound.

The door to the school was blocked by two armed
andartes
. From inside, the hoarse cries formed words: “Please, no more! I didn’t do anything! I don’t even own a rifle! God help me!”

In answer to the shouted questions of the crowd, one of the guards said that a boy named Antonis Kollios was being “disciplined” for owning a weapon he had not reported to the people’s army. At once, everyone understood what had happened, and they all began trying to explain to the guards that it was a terrible mistake.

Antonis Kollios was a boy of eighteen, given to pranks but not a troublemaker. His family owned fields next to those of Stavros Daflakis, an elderly farmer whose sight was growing dim with glaucoma. The Daflakis and Kollios families were forever feuding over the exact placement of their mutual boundary lines.

In a world where status and survival depend on landownership, battles over boundaries are common. Daflakis often stormed into the Kollios fields, complaining that their cabbages were trespassing into his garden, and Antonis liked to frighten him off by brandishing a stick that resembled a rifle. The old man was too blind to know the difference. No doubt he had taken his grievance to the
andartes
, who were now beating the boy because they wanted his “weapon.”

As Antonis’ cries weakened, the villagers’ protests became more frantic. The two guards raised their guns. Suddenly the screaming stopped. The crowd stepped back when the door opened, and half a dozen guerrillas, including Mitsi Bollis, appeared, surprised at seeing so many people. The villagers fell back to let the uniformed men pass, then surged into the school, where they found Antonis Kollios lying unconscious on the floor of Minas Stratis’ classroom, his clothes striped with blood where the flexible switches from the cornel tree had cut through his skin. The villagers picked him up and carried him away, wondering how the stirring words of Prokopi Skevis and his followers could be reconciled with this senseless beating.

Before the procession reached Antonis’ house, the Skevis band of guerrillas was marching out of Lia in the direction of Babouri. On the way Prokopi Skevis confided to his protégé, the pockmarked schoolteacher Doupis, that he was worried about the effect the incident would have on the village’s opinion of the
andartes
. “Yesterday, in church, they were solidly behind us,” he told Doupis. “Now they’ll be saying we’ve beaten an innocent boy!”

Later that afternoon two guerrillas returned to Lia and ordered Father Zisis to summon the people by ringing the church bells. When they had gathered, one of the partisans took a small bag from his pocket and emptied it into his palm. “This money was to buy our food for tomorrow,” he told the villagers, “but we’ve learned that the Kollios boy was innocent. ELAS does not spill innocent blood. Therefore, we’ve agreed to go without eating all day tomorrow and, instead, to give this money to Antonis Kollios in reparation for our mistake.” Putting the bills back in the bag, he handed it to the priest. “You will take it to him.”