Eleni (21 page)

The villagers watched as one guerrilla began to dance, slow emphatic steps, his arms outstretched, now and then slapping his palm against the side of his shoe. The voices became louder as the song began again, brave words that the peasants had heard many times before at the propaganda gatherings. Until today, their own voices had joined in, united with the guerrillas in their longing for freedom and hatred of the enemy. Now there was a new undertone to the words. The wails of the prisoners created a terrible cacophony. The silent peasants stared at the guerrillas with disbelief, wondering how the fine speeches of Prokopi Skevis had given birth to this ghastly chorus.

Among the frightened faces turned toward the guerrillas, who were grinning now as they shouted out the words, was that of Eleni Gatzoyiannis. She felt her skin crawl as she heard the wails, a hellish antiphon to the martial music. The cries from within the schoolhouse ceased abruptly and the guerrillas’ song trailed off. Everyone held his breath. The door opened slowly and the guards stepped aside. The four prisoners from Lia stood there, blinking in the light. There was a groan as the villagers saw what had been done to them.

Vasili Stratis was first, holding his shoes in his hand because his feet were swollen to twice their normal size. He staggered, then fell down the four steps to the ground. No one moved to catch him. The only sound was the thud of his body hitting each step. As he lay there, the crowd drew back in horror. Then two boys, former classmates of Vasili’s, pushed forward and carried him home. At the sight of him, his mother slaughtered one of the goats and wrapped the boy inside the raw hide to draw the black blood from his bruises. She could see that he would never walk upright again. She did not tell Vasili where Minas was hiding, nor did she tell Minas what the
andartes
had done to his younger brother.

Kitso Haidis came out the door next, walking by himself, apparently unhurt. Eleni covered her mouth with her hand, as if to stifle a cry, then she pushed forward and embraced her father, but he pulled away, refusing to be helped. She led him out of the crowd as her children trailed behind, staring at their grandfather curiously.

“Did they beat you?” she whispered.

Kitso winked at her and tapped his temple with his index finger. “They didn’t touch me,” he said. “I outfoxed them. I convinced them I was crazy!”

Eleni said nothing, but wondered if Costa Haidis had intervened on behalf of his uncle. She later put the question to her cousin directly, but he changed the subject and refused to answer. When her father repeated and embellished the story of how he had fooled the guerrillas, Eleni never contradicted him.

Only the four prisoners from Lia were released. Another twenty-one men from nearby villages were held in the school for a week longer, then led off on an eight-day march to a town in western Macedonia where they were put in prison camps. Two of them, a Greek army officer who had been fighting for EDES, and a schoolteacher from Yeromeri, were held back and shot just outside of Lia.

The dream of revolution and freedom painted by the Skevis brothers had turned into a nightmare, and fear settled over the village. The British commandos felt it as much as the Greeks. Eleni learned from Angeliki that the officers, barricaded inside their house and informed of the beatings and executions by their domestic staff, were beginning to crumble under Spiro Skevis’ psychological warfare against them. Skevis was convinced that the British were supplying food, sovereigns and arms to Zervas’ EDES forces. He came to the mission nearly every day demanding the same compensation for his own men. Each time, the officers told him that none of the guerrilla groups would receive British aid until they stopped fighting among themselves.

Angeliki described the claustrophobic atmosphere of the headquarters. Skevis’ men prowled the edges of the house day and night, making noises to intimidate those inside. The cold December weather and heavy rains
increased the gloom. Captain Ian contracted influenza and a high fever, and Angeliki was sent to bring a Greek doctor, who bled him with leeches.

The Skevis guerrillas stepped up their harassment of the mission, and wouldn’t let Angeliki and her sister go as far as the spring to draw water. No one wanted to venture to the outhouse. The interpreter had told her that one night Captain Philip took advantage of an open window to relieve himself and was rewarded with a string of Greek oaths and the sight of a drenched Mitsi Bollis scrambling into the bushes.

Captain Ian was “coming a bit unglued,” Angeliki whispered to Eleni. He imagined enemies everywhere and even accused her and the others of trying to poison him by putting olive oil on the salad greens. Eleni shook her head, wondering what protection there would be for the villagers themselves if the British commandos could be so intimidated by the local Skevis guerrillas.

On Christmas Day of 1943, the Liotes were alarmed to see the ELAS
andartes
gathering in the square in battle formation. They soon learned that Zervas’ EDES army had crossed the barrier of the Kalamas River and was moving toward Pogoni, where ELAS was going to try to stop them. Skevis ordered all the reservists to prepare for battle. Before the day was over, the guerrillas and the reserves marched off, leaving Lia nearly empty of men. Within twenty-four hours a small detachment of EDES guerrillas arrived in the village, and to everyone’s astonishment Minas Stratis emerged from below his neighbor’s kitchen floor, nearly unrecognizable with a forty-days’ growth of beard.

A few days later Lia received the most illustrious visitor it had ever seen: the dapper little Italian General Alberto Infante, commander of the ill-fated Pinerolo Division, which had been disarmed by ELAS two months before. He was brought to the Bovington Mission so that the British could evacuate him and the several Italian officers with him north over the mountains to Albania where they would escape by sea to Italy. On January 2, 1944, Captain Philip set out to lead the Italians to safety. In the nine days he was gone, the seesaw of power in the village changed once again. Zervas was being driven southward, and the EDES forces pulled out of Lia, taking Minas Stratis with them. A decisive ELAS victory on the night of January 4 left most of the Mourgana mountains, including Lia, in ELAS hands, where it would remain for the rest of the war.

With Captain Philip away, Ian was alone in charge of the British post when Spiro Skevis returned with his men and resumed hounding him. Ian’s predicament worsened with the addition of a new responsibility—two downed air crews, one British and one American, who arrived in Lia to be evacuated to safety. Of the seventeen fliers, more than half were suffering from malaria. Even though Angeliki and her sister worked far into the night cooking for the new arrivals, there was not enough food, medicine or
bedding to go around. Even the outhouse was inadequate for the crowd, so trenches had to be dug on the hill above the headquarters, and they overflowed with the first heavy rain.

The news that a crew of American pilots was in the village filled Eleni with the hope that one of them might be from Massachusetts and have some news of her husband. She had not received a letter from Christos for three and a half years, since the Italian invasion cut off communications. She hurried to the village square, where the fliers who were not ill passed the time in snowball fights with the village children. Eleni resolutely approached the interpreter and handed him a piece of paper with Christos’ address in Worcester written on it. She knew it was unrealistic to expect that one of the young soldiers might have heard of her husband, but she was determined to find out. She watched with falling spirits as the paper was passed from hand to hand and the strangers shouted the words “Worcester, Massachusetts” to one another and shook their heads. Finally the interpreter passed the paper back to her and explained kindly that even if one of them had been from Worcester, American cities were larger than she thought, larger even than Yannina, and the chances of any one American soldier knowing her husband were infinitesimal.

Trying to hide her disappointment from the foreigners, Eleni decided to visit Nitsa, who lived just above the British headquarters nearby. She found Nitsa and Andreas entertaining “Henry” the cook from the mission, a round, garrulous man named Andreas Tsifoutis. He loved to gossip, and with much shaking of his head and expressive gestures, he described how Captain Ian had become unstrung to the point where even the Greek-speaking staff could tell he was having a nervous breakdown. The cook hoped that the other captain would return before something tragic happened. He told how Spiro Skevis had arrived one night, loudly demanding money and arms, and Ian became so frantic that he pulled out a hand grenade and threatened to blow up the entire house if Skevis didn’t leave. The next day Ian called the staff together and told them that the doors and windows of the headquarters were being wired and booby-trapped with explosives because he feared an attack by the Skevis guerrillas. “In the morning, if you don’t see the door open,” Ian advised the Botsaris girls through the interpreter, “don’t come in. Don’t touch anything, because if you do, you’ll blow yourselves to bits and us with you.”

Nitsa rocked back and forth, her hands over her ears, and exclaimed that if the Fafoutis house exploded it would take her house with it. To distract her, the cook launched into a comical recitation of Ian’s behavior when he was drunk, which now was most of the time. Ian slept every night with a pail of Albanian beer at his bedside as well as an empty bucket to use as a chamber pot, and sometimes in the night he’d be so groggy he’d confuse the two.

The hostility between the British and the ELAS guerrillas reached a climax soon after Captain Philip returned, when Spiro and Prokopi Skevis
organized a massive demonstration in the village to pressure the British into giving them supplies and money. ELAS supporters flooded in from all over the Mourgana villages and beyond. The central square was not large enough to contain the thousands of demonstrators, who arrived shouting, “Give us food! Give us arms! Give us medicine! We are fighting for you and you have forgotten us!” It was the largest gathering in the history of the village, and the Liotes marveled at the number and strength of the supporters rallied by the Skevis brothers.

Eleni could see that the mood of the demonstrators was ugly and she forbade her children to leave the house, worrying that someone might be hurt. She followed her neighbors to the square and watched apprehensively as the two British officers and their interpreter walked, grim and pale, from their headquarters to the square through the gauntlet of shouting Greeks. They were clearly frightened, and she wondered if Ian’s fragile mental balance would survive the demonstration.

Four decades later Philip Nind remembered his apprehensions. “I was more afraid of Spiro Skevis than of the Germans,” he said, and in his journal made at the time he described the Skevis brothers: “The elder [Prokopi] was a politician … filled with book-read Marxism which used to pour out from his mouth in rather amusing contexts and clichés. The younger [Spiro] was the most dangerous man I met in Greece. He commanded a battalion and commanded it well. Energetic and shrewd, his fanaticism had warped his mind in the most disagreeable manner. He was a sadist with, to my knowledge, many cold-blooded murders to his name; and all the complaints of ELAS torturing in that area were laid at his door.”

The knot of British officers tried to keep their feet in the shouting throng until Prokopi Skevis silenced the people with a gesture and climbed up on a table to address them. He spoke stirringly, demanding that the British honor ELAS requests for money and aid so that they could defeat the traitor Zervas. The crowd cheered every word.

When the applause died down, Eleni saw Captain Ian climb shakily onto the table with the interpreter beside him. She was surprised to hear him speak simply and effectively. “We are soldiers under orders, who do what we are told, just as you do!” he shouted. “You ask for arms. You complain that the dropping of supplies has stopped. It will start again when you end your civil war and return to fighting the enemy!”

He blinked as an angry voice from the crowd interrupted him. “One question, Captain!” someone shouted. “When you fight traitors, is that called a civil war?”

When the question was translated, Ian paused, thinking hard. Then he answered with an analogy that clearly struck home to the family-oriented Greek peasants. “My father has four sons,” he said. “When we fought with each other, he would never take the side of one or the other, no matter what the circumstances. He had to try to restore peace in the family so that it could work toward the good of all of us. We needed the strength that comes from unity.”

Spiro Skevis was too angry to let him go on. “Answer the question, Englishman!” he called out. “Zervas is a traitor! Down with Zervas! Death to Zervas!”

The crowd had wavered for a moment, but now they joined in. “Down with Zervas!” they shouted. “Death!” Eleni was reminded of the guerrillas singing outside the schoolhouse while their prisoners were being beaten inside. Her neighbors’ faces were transformed with hate as they began stamping and shouting for blood. To Eleni, Ian’s parable had seemed sensible and apt. She was reminded of how, when she assigned Glykeria and Kanta each to sweep half of the front steps and terrace, they would wrangle over who had the dirtier, harder part, arguing until nothing was accomplished, and in disgust, Eleni ended by cleaning the steps herself. In the same way, ELAS and EDES were depending on the Allies to sweep the Germans out until not only the steps but the whole house was clean. Then they planned to battle for control of the house, and if they continued wrangling like children, they could end by destroying it and bringing the roof down on their heads.

The crowd was in no mood to listen to parables or explanations, and Eleni watched as the British officers hastily pushed their way back toward the safety of their headquarters before the demonstrators decided to turn their anger on them.