Eleni (2 page)

By the time I finished college I had saved enough money from part-time work on local newspapers to make a return visit to the village which I had left as a refugee fourteen years before. I intended to begin my search for the details of my mother’s death.

When I walked out of that village as a boy, I knew every tree and rock of my circumscribed world, but as I followed the new dirt road back up our mountain in 1963, I mistook two villages in the distance for my own before I reached Lia. Clearly, my memory was not as accurate as I had believed. When I finally reached it, the village was no longer deserted; many of the civilians who had been taken into Albania and then dispersed throughout Eastern Europe by the retreating Communists had drifted back since 1954. The guerrillas and their collaborators, however, were still not permitted by the Greek government to return.

I was met by my eighty-three-year-old grandfather, the only male relative I had known as a boy. I remembered him as an aloof, menacing tyrant. He was the one who returned to the empty village to unearth the bodies of my mother and my aunt, then brought the news of their deaths to us children. When he saw me, now twenty-three, my grandfather was the first of many villagers to exclaim over my physical resemblance to my mother. My face seemed to incite the neighbors to pour out details of her torture and suffering. As soon as they began, I discovered that I could not bear to listen. When one man tried to tell me how her feet and legs were swollen to grotesque proportions by beatings, I got up and left the room.

On that first afternoon, when my grandparents were taking their siesta, I left their house and climbed the path up to our old property, now deserted and shunned by the villagers because it had been used by the guerrillas as a military police station, jail, killing ground and cemetery. I knew that my mother had spent the last days of her life being tortured there, imprisoned in the filthy cellar where we once kept our sheep and goats. I forced myself to enter the front door and look into the room which had served as a kitchen, where my mother, sisters and I used to sleep on the floor around the hearth. The room seemed to have shrunk over the years. There was nothing inside, no sign that I belonged here. I tried to recall happy times, feast days, but all I could think of were the condemned prisoners in the cellar, my mother among them. I didn’t approach the cellar door but left the house, knowing I would not come back.

That fall, when I returned to America to begin graduate school, I made a tentative assault on the book but barely got past the first few pages. I started by trying to describe the oppressively hot afternoon when my grandfather came to tell us that our mother had been murdered. Just the memory of my sisters’ screams stopped me and I put the pages aside, channeling my
energies for the next few years into completing graduate school and finding a job as a reporter. As a boy, I naively thought that I could write the story of my mother’s death from my own memories. Now I knew that those memories were flawed and incomplete. I knew also that I did not have the strength to face the details of her suffering.

My sisters had neither the desire nor the money to return to Greece until 1969, when two of them resolved to go back to the village and hold a memorial service for our mother. I decided to go with them, although I knew it would be a painful journey. When we reached Lia, I followed them up the path as far as our land, but when my sisters entered the house, I refused to go with them and waited outside until they emerged, in tears.

The next day the whole village gathered in our neighborhood Church of St. Demetrios for the memorial service. The church was used only on special saints’ days, but the village priest agreed to open it and conduct the liturgy. In a small ossuary, divided from the sanctuary by a wall, lay the bones of my mother and my aunt in a small wooden box, mixed together as they had been when my grandfather disinterred the bodies from the mass grave.

Sun slanted through the dusty windows of the crowded church as the priest began to chant and the altar boys swung the censers, the heavy perfume mingling with the odor of decay. Unexpectedly, the schoolteacher stood up to speak. He was the only educated man in the village and he wanted to deliver a eulogy. As soon as he said our mother’s name, my sisters began to wail: keening, ululating cries, the Greek expression of sorrow for the dead.

“This woman’s death was not an ordinary one,” the schoolteacher continued over the commotion. “She was executed alone, with her husband far away, because she tried to save her children. She was a victim of her fellow Greeks. This is not an ordinary memorial service for the dead; she was murdered!”

As I stood there, trying to wish myself anywhere else, the air pressed in on me and I was aware of my mother’s bones only yards away. Nearly every day of my childhood I had watched her light a candle before this altar. The shrieks of my sisters stripped away the veneer of control I had built up, layer by layer. Even when I was a boy, on the day my mother said goodbye, and again, when I learned she was dead, I had held my grief inside. Now it erupted. Sobs welled up from where they had been hidden for so many years and shook my body like a convulsion. The rush of emotion blurred my vision and then my knees buckled. Two men nearby grabbed my arms and supported me out of the church, setting me on the ground, my back against the trunk of one of the towering cypress trees surrounding the graveyard.

That outburst was the first and last time I lost control and abandoned myself to my grief, but when it passed, I discovered a new strength within me. At last I was ready to learn what the villagers had to tell me and to look directly at the details of my mother’s death.

When I began asking questions, I found that many parts of the story were still beyond my reach. The villagers who had betrayed her, who testified against her to curry favor with the guerrillas, were still in exile behind the Iron Curtain. And the witnesses to her last days who were living in Lia gave me contradictory testimony about many incidents, obviously withholding details that might compromise them or their relatives. Those who were willing to talk about the war years openly remembered the guerrillas only by the pseudonyms they had assumed to mask their identities. I spent all the summer of 1969 in Lia, but when I left in the fall to return to America, it was clear that despite my emotional readiness to hear my mother’s story, I did not have access to key people involved or the skills to get the truth out of them.

On my return to New York I submerged myself in the business of life. I married a girl I had known since graduate school and in rapid succession we had three children, first a son named Christos for my father, then two daughters, the elder one baptized Eleni after my mother.

I began a job for the
New York Times
as an investigative reporter, a brand of newspaperman who is as much a detective as a journalist. I learned how to ferret out facts that others wanted hidden and to make witnesses trip themselves up, trapping themselves with their own words. I shadowed subjects and followed up anonymous tips and took care to verify and recheck every scrap of information, spending weeks going through dusty files and government papers. I wrote about corrupt politicians, crooked judges, narcotics traffickers and Mafia chieftains. On occasion I was subpoenaed, once by Vice President Spiro Agnew, but my evidence was always too well documented for anyone to sue me. The seven years that passed after the memorial service for my mother were hectic and distracting ones. Only later did I realize that I was unconsciously honing my skills and training myself for the task I had chosen as a boy: to find out what happened to my mother and who was responsible for her death. My circuitous path was leading inexorably back to the ravine where she was executed.

In July of 1974 the collapse of the dictatorial right-wing military junta ruling Greece opened the gates for Communist guerrillas living in exile to return to the country. Many of those I wanted to question about my mother’s trial and death would now be accessible to me. In 1977 I persuaded my editors to send me to Athens as the
New York Times’
foreign correspondent in the eastern Mediterranean. The conditions necessary for me to begin the search for my mother’s story were all coming together.

The arrival in Greece in 1977 was a shock to someone who remembered the civil war years. I discovered that the fall of the junta and the establishment of a new civilian government, which legalized the Communist Party in an effort to ensure acceptance of Greece in the Common Market, had created a renaissance of Communist power in the country. Posters, movies, books, popular songs and the youth organizations in the universities were united in celebrating the guerrillas of the civil war as heroes. It seemed that
the best talents of Greece were busy rewriting the history of the war, while everywhere, Communist leaders were denying that such things as the execution of civilians and the abduction of large groups of children from the mountain villages had ever happened.

As soon as I settled in Athens with my family I hoped to spend every spare moment tracking down and questioning those who had been my mother’s interrogators, jailers, torturers and the judges at her trial, as well as relatives and neighbors who had witnessed her last days. But the volatile political climate in the area left me time for little else but my job. I spent most of my first years in Greece traveling outside the country, covering terrorism in Turkey, battles in the Middle East, a revolution in Iran, and civil war in Afghanistan.

By 1980 it was clear that I had to give myself up entirely to the investigation of my mother’s story at once or never do it. I learned that some of the guerrilla leaders responsible for her trial and execution had died in exile. Others were likely to die of old age before I could track them down. Furthermore, Greece has a thirty-year statute of limitation on all crimes—including murder. Anyone who had committed any atrocity during the war years could now return to the country without fear of punishment, and the former leaders of the guerrillas were flooding back in.

In 1980 I was forty-one years old, the same age that my mother had been when she was killed. My son was nine, as I was on the day I learned she was dead. My older daughter, growing out of babyhood, resembled my mother more every day. Seeing my children grow had taught me a lesson that made my mother’s story easier to confront.

When I was young I was convinced that her existence was one of unrelieved misery because for the last decade of her life she struggled every day to keep us five children alive, despite war and famine, with no help from anyone. But as I watched my own children I realized that there must have been joy and laughter to reward her while she lived. Knowing that made it easier to face what I would learn.

Finally, clues about the identities of some of her killers began to filter to me in Athens and I knew I couldn’t hesitate any longer. I decided to leave my job with the newspaper to devote all my energy to the search for my mother’s story.

The first clue came from a childhood friend who told me about a visit back to Lia on a summer feast day when he fell into conversation with another villager, named Antoni Makos. Makos said that he was the thirteen-year-old boy drinking at the spring on the day my mother passed by to her execution. He told of a strange coincidence: twenty years later, in 1968, he happened to enter a bar in the northern Greek city of Yannina and recognized the owner of the place as one of the armed guerrillas who led the condemned to their deaths.

I found Makos at the shop in a suburb of Athens where he bakes pastries for cafés. Wearing a floury apron over his ample stomach, he led me into
the back room and agreed to talk. We were both nervous: I was afraid of what I was going to hear and he was reluctant to open old wounds.

The years had built scar tissue over the fact of my mother’s death, but there were questions gnawing at me that I had always been afraid to ask. I heard whispers that she was so badly tortured before her execution that she had to be carried up the mountain on horseback. I took a deep breath and asked Makos. When he told me that she had walked past him—barefoot, yes, on legs swollen from torture, but walking and apparently in her right mind—I felt a great weight lifted. One of the nightmarish scenes that had haunted me dissolved.

Seeing that I wouldn’t become emotional, Makos relaxed and told me proudly about the day when he recognized the guerrilla in a soldiers’ bar in Yannina. He struck up a conversation with him and learned that he had been stationed in Lia. His name, said Makos, was Taki Cotees. If I went to Yannina, he said, to the bar just opposite the back of the military post, I’d probably find him still sitting at the same table.

It takes only forty-five minutes to fly from Athens to Yannina, a provincial capital of crumbling minarets and peasant women in village costume. I arrived on a rainy winter day. With a distant cousin, an army major stationed there, I began combing the bars that cater to soldiers. When we reached the one Taki owned, we found that it had been closed.

Discouraged, we went into another bar close-by where my cousin knew the bartender, a talkative fellow who said he knew Taki Cotees, who pimped for the prostitutes employed in his bar until it was closed down. Although the bartender didn’t know his present address, he volunteered that Taki was a frequent visitor to the political office of a local member of Parliament because he was trying to wheedle permission for a sister still exiled in Russia to be allowed back into Greece.

Political patronage and reciprocal favors are the lubricants that turn every wheel in Greece. As it happened, I knew that politician from my days as a correspondent and convinced him to look up the former guerrilla’s file for me. Luckily, Taki was one of the few guerrillas who hadn’t hidden behind a
nom de guerre
during the war. The deputy called Taki into his office and introduced me as a friend from the United States, a writer who “wants some information you can give him. Please help him all you can.”

My stomach was knotted with tension as I looked at the face of a man who, when he was twenty years old, had watched my mother die, perhaps even fired one of the shots. Taki bore no resemblance to my image of him. He was a small, frail, gnomelike man, untidy wisps of gray hair spiking out around his bald pate, his lower face caved in around an overbite. He had the sly, shriveled look of a doll made from a dried apple. The only thing still young about him was his eyes, which were a startling gold color and darted about nervously.