Eleni (20 page)

On her way home from church that morning, Eleni Gatzoyiannis encountered her cousin Eugenia, the wife of the ELAS guerrilla Mitsi Bollis, who had set the fox on the Gatzoyiannis chicken coop. Eugenia warned Eleni sternly that her father was going to get himself and the whole Gatzoyiannis family in trouble by attending the EDES memorial service. Eleni smiled and shrugged. “Everyone knows father likes to do the opposite of whatever the majority do,” she said.

“It may be an old man’s foolishness,” Eugenia replied, “but some people don’t see it in such an innocent light.”

Spiro Skevis’ forces were collecting in Pogoni, sixteen miles to the northeast, and joined by other ELAS guerrillas, they planned an attack to retake the Mourgana. They conscripted women from Pogoni to carry heavy guns over snow-choked mountain paths that were too steep even for mules, and one of the women fell dead under the weight of the mortar she carried.

At midnight on November 14, Major Sarantis, the EDES commander, was awakened in the schoolhouse of Lia by a messenger warning that ELAS was about to attack. He ran to warn Minas Stratis and the British officers. After a heated debate, the British commandos decided not to flee with Sarantis, for that would ruin their claim of being neutral in the guerrilla war. As the machine guns of ELAS began to strafe the village, Major Sarantis and his men disappeared in the direction of Keramitsa. Minas went with them, but in the rainy night he was separated from the EDES officer and lost his way.

The next morning the Gatzoyiannis family and the rest of Lia awoke to discover that ELAS had reoccupied the village, the Skevis company being reinforced by several hundred more ELAS fighters whom they had never seen. There was an outburst of joy that the local guerrillas were back, but it quickly turned to apprehension as word spread that the guerrillas were rounding up all persons suspected of sympathizing with EDES.

The first one arrested was eighteen-year-old Vasili Stratis, the younger brother of the schoolteacher Minas. His mother wept as the second son she had lost in the past twenty-four hours was taken from her house.

Kitso Haidis was setting out for his mill when two unfamiliar ELAS
andartes
arrived on his front step. When they seized him, he shouted that it was a mistake: they must want someone else. “I’ve done nothing and my nephew is Costa Haidis, the commissar here!” he ranted. But when they marched him out before Megali’s frightened eyes, Kitso silently cursed himself for attending the EDES memorial service in Babouri.

The village square was a sea of guerrillas, some in unfamiliar uniforms, all wearing the two-pointed caps and carrying guns. Kitso looked in vain for a familiar face as he was dragged toward the schoolhouse.

Inside were two classrooms and two small offices, painted a muddy gray-green. Kitso was shoved into one of the small cubicles, which was crowded with two dozen prisoners. There were three other men from Lia: Vasili Stratis, the cooper Vasili Nikou, and Yiorgos Boukouvalas, an owlish old man who walked with two canes because he was born with malformed feet. Like Kitso, they were all considered royalists. He also recognized at least a dozen men from Babouri who had been at the memorial service, and as the afternoon wore on, more prisoners brought from Tsamanta, three miles to the west, were thrown into the room, filling it until they could scarcely find a place to stand, much less sit.

As soon as Kitso was arrested, Megali ran up the mountainside to tell Eleni. The sight of her mother’s distraught face forced Eleni to remain calm. She knew there was no one else in the family with enough presence of mind to help her father except herself. While she assured her mother it must be a mistake she tried to think what to do. Her only hope was her cousin Costa Haidis. Despite what Eleni thought of the political commissar, he could hardly allow his uncle to be imprisoned, or worse, by ELAS.

Telling Megali to go home and wait, Eleni hurried off to the village square, where Costa had requisitioned one of the houses as his office. She was prepared to humble herself and to plead, but when she gave a guard outside the door the message that she wanted to speak with her cousin, he returned to say that Comrade Haidis was much too busy to see
Kyria
Eleni. She felt angry blood rising to her face, but she said nothing. She walked over to the schoolhouse at the southern edge of the square, where a crowd of weeping women and children had gathered, pleading for news of the prisoners inside.

The sound of their lamentations unsettled Eleni more than she admitted. She tried to reason with herself: the guerrillas were local people, after all, not Germans. They were only trying to frighten the village by making an example of those who had been friendly to EDES. To escape the frantic crowd, Eleni began to walk around the school building, searching for a clue to what was going on inside. At the eastern wall, where the slope dropped abruptly, she paused under one of the high windows where she saw a
shadow. Then she made out a familiar shock of white hair.
“Patera!”
she called softly.

His face appeared at the window. She could see at once that he was terrified. Her father had always been such a formidable presence to Eleni that she never imagined him looking so old and so vulnerable. She cupped her hands around her mouth and hissed, “Don’t be afraid! We’ll get you out.”

Kitso regarded her in silence. Perhaps he, too, was aware that for the first time he was helpless and dependent on one of his daughters to save him. Suddenly he disappeared from the window, then something white fluttered to Eleni’s feet. She bent over and picked it up. It was a handkerchief with a knot tied in the corner. She loosened it and found a pair of gold hoop earrings. She looked up at her father in confusion.

“I was going to give them to Olga when she married,” Kitso said in a hoarse whisper. “See that she gets them.” Then he was gone. Eleni stood holding the two golden circles in her hand and realized that her cheeks were wet. She closed her fingers over the earrings and turned away.

The prisoners in the tiny room sat silent as the guards called them out, one at a time. They could hear the screams from where they were, a rising and falling wail like a death song, punctuated by the dull sound of wood striking flesh. Every time a prisoner was taken from the room, the remaining captives drew closer into themselves, avoiding the eyes of the others.

Eleni ran straight through the ravine down to the house of her uncle Yiorgos Haidis, father of Commissar Costa. She found him feeding his chickens. When she told him that the ELAS guerrillas had arrested her father, the old man spat in the mud. “Damn Costa!” he exclaimed. “He talks about a new Greece, but I warned him it would come to this. ‘You will dig with pick for water,’ I said, ‘and blood will gush forth!’ ”

Together, Eleni and her uncle hurried back up the mountain toward the village square.

The sun was slanting through the fly-specked windows of the school office when the guards came in and motioned to Vasili Stratis. Every other man in the room breathed an involuntary sigh of relief. Vasili discovered that his legs wouldn’t support him.

They dragged him through a dark hall to the tiny office at the western end. The guards pushed the door open. The first thing the boy saw was the cripple Boukouvalas lying in a fetal position on the floor. His clublike feet were bare, but Vasili could see they were unscarred; the stumps were too twisted to provide a grip for
falanga
, and in frustration the guerrillas had
beaten every inch of the old man’s body. Now he was curled on his side, moaning wordlessly.

The odor of blood and shit hit Vasili’s nostrils. This was his brother’s office, where Minas tended to his duties as secretary of the village and helped illiterate Liotes fill out official papers. The pencil-marked desk and filing cabinets were familiar, but the two guerrilla officers who stood silhouetted against the dirty windows were not. There was a pile of clubs and switches in one corner.

Vasili squinted into the light and the features of the two ELAS officers came into focus. The short one was paunchy, with the intelligent face of a fox. Vasili recognized him with surprise as a teacher from Zitsa named Polychronis Vayis, who had gone to the teachers academy with Minas Stratis and later became notorious fighting for ELAS under the name of
Kapetan
Petritis. A veneer of civilized erudition masked his brutal nature. Later the Gatzoyiannis family would come to know Petritis well.

Vasili Stratis was careful not to indicate that he recognized the officer, for he knew it could cost him his life. Petritis began by asking questions in a conversational tone, his smile revealing a gold tooth. He asked for the names of EDES sympathizers and especially the whereabouts of Vasili’s brother Minas, never referring to and totally ignoring the moaning body of Boukouvalas on the floor. When Vasili mumbled that he had no idea where Minas was hiding, Petritis motioned to the other man, who stepped forward. They grabbed his hair and bent him over, beating him on the back and flanks with a piece of wood as thick as his wrist. Vasili instinctively put his hand behind him and the club opened a three-inch gash, which began to drip blood onto the floor. The blows fell in a relentless rhythm as Vasili felt his bones snap.

After the clubbing it was time for
falanga
. Two armed guards came in to hold his feet flexed between the strap and barrel of a rifle as the officers smashed their clubs against his soles. When Vasili squirmed on the floor, Petritis stepped on his face, filling his mouth with dirt, teeth and blood.

The boy was still conscious when the officers told him that they would give him another chance to remember where his brother was hiding and kicked him into a corner next to Boukouvalas. He saw the door open, revealing Kitso Haidis standing there, held firmly by two guards. Petritis let Kitso get a good look, then motioned to the guards to drag out the two inert bodies.

They were slung into one of the large classrooms and as they fell among others who had been beaten, Vasili saw next to him a young man named Dimitrios Kyratsis whose father owned the general store in Tsamanta. His face was gray and blood was trickling from his nostrils. Vasili could see a puncture wound, as if made by a nail, over his left eyebrow. That night the body of young Kyratsis disappeared from the schoolhouse and his family never learned what became of it.

•  •  •

Eleni and Yiorgos Haidis pushed their way through the crowd outside Costa Haidis’ office. Yiorgos insisted so loudly on seeing his son that the guards finally let him pass, but they forced Eleni to wait outside. When he came back out the old man was leaning heavily on his cane, his head bowed. “I talked to Costa,” he said harshly. “I told him that if anything happens to my brother, I will no longer recognize him as my son. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He said he would do what he could, but the matter wasn’t within his authority.”

Seeing Eleni’s face, he put his arm around her and told her she had to at least act hopeful so that her mother and children wouldn’t despair.

In the inquisition room Kitso Haidis stood facing the two officers. He blocked out the smell and the way Boukouvalas and Vasili Stratis had looked, trying to think clearly. His cleverness had always saved him until now. He stared around the room and gazed upward at the smoky patches over the hanging kerosene lamps. Then, walking past the uniformed officers, Kitso casually pulled out the only chair and sat down, crossing his legs comfortably and gazing raptly at a fly that was treading its way across the ceiling. Petritis and the other man watched him in surprise.

Petritis glanced at a piece of paper and spoke sternly. “You are the miller Kitso Haidis,” he said. “Your fascist sympathies are well known. You have been seen repeatedly fraternizing with the EDES mercenaries and with the traitor Sarantis. The only way to save yourself is to tell us where he’s hiding.”

Kitso began to giggle as the officers looked at each other in alarm. The miller pointed at the ceiling. “He’s right up there,” Kitso chortled, “watching everything you’re doing!”

There was a moment of startled silence, then Petritis reached for a club. “Maybe we can pound your brains back into place,” he said. They were interrupted by a knock at the door. A man in civilian clothes passed a folded note to Petritis.

The next morning a heavy fog lay on the mountainside when Minas Stratis’ wife opened her door to find her husband standing there. “What are you doing?” she gasped, pulling him inside. “They’ve already taken Vasili! Do you want to see our house shuttered in mourning?”

Under cover of the fog, Minas had come home because there was no place else to go. He had been cut off at the Great Ridge by the battle between ELAS and EDES and had spent two nights in a haystack.

Even though she was distracted with worry for her younger son, Minas’ mother managed to convince a trusted neighbor to hide the schoolteacher
in the tiny storage space under his kitchen floor. “I’m putting my son’s life in your hands and the hands of God,” she told him. Minas huddled in the tiny space for the next forty days and often heard the sound of his own two children playing overhead, never suspecting where their father had gone.

As the sun burned off the mist, a crowd of villagers began to gather outside the schoolhouse. By noontime nearly everyone in Lia was assembled. Their numbers and their silence unnerved the armed
andartes
standing in front of the door. The villagers and the guerrillas returned one another’s stares, their breath rising like smoke in the frigid air, until suddenly an appalling chorus of pain burst from the western classroom of the school where the officers had waded into the group of prisoners and were clubbing them, flailing at the writhing mass of heads, arms and legs like threshers harvesting wheat. A shudder passed through the crowd outside.

As the great cry rose from the schoolhouse, the armed
andartes
outside began to sing at a signal from their leader. At first their voices were tuneless and uncertain, but with the defiant words they gained conviction until they were shouting out the verses and stamping their feet to the rhythm.