Eleni (28 page)

“With their clothes on,
Mana?”
asked Fotini.

“With special swimming clothes, like underwear,” she replied, embarrassed. “Both men and women go into the same pool. Of course, good women don’t.”

Nikola fell asleep thinking about swimming-pool rooms, and when he awoke to the kind of early morning heat that promises a rainstorm, he followed his mother around, asking questions. “If they have rooms full of water,
Mana
, how come the water doesn’t pour out when they open the door?”

“Because it’s a hole in the ground,” she replied absently. “Now go outside and stop getting under my feet!”

Nikola went out and climbed up on the wide slab over the arched gateway and lay down. It was the same spot from which he had fallen when he was three years old, but this was still where he did his best thinking.

Glykeria and Kanta were sent early in the morning to take the goats and sheep up to the family’s field in the Agora, behind the Chapel of St. Nicholas. The wheat had recently been cut and now pale-green shoots, grass and weeds were poking up through the stubble. Until the spot was plowed and replanted, it was the one time of the year when the girls could allow the animals to graze on flat ground while they sat under a tree watching from afar, not having to worry that a stray kid would fall down a ravine, get picked off by a wolf, or attack another villager’s crops.

Glykeria was lying under a holm oak, recovering from the long climb and eying the bulging pockets of Kanta’s apron. “Walking so far makes me hungry!” she complained.

“I warned you not to eat your bread and onions before we even got up here!” Kanta scolded. “You can’t have mine, so don’t ask.”

Far below them they noticed Vasilo Barka, the simple-minded shepherdess, climbing up toward the same fields with the large flock of animals she
was paid to look after. She stopped to water them at a spring, and Glykeria and Kanta saw a young boy named Yianni pass by and start talking to her. He playfully tried to grab her, and they heard her squeals of anger. Vasilo began throwing rocks at him to drive him away, and he laughed and ran out of sight.

Vasilo and her flock climbed higher and the girls soon could hear her ranting angrily to her goats, as if they were human, “Filthy men, they’re all after one thing! Trying to get into poor Vasilo’s drawers. Trying to ruin poor Vasilo.”

When she arrived at the pasture, Glykeria called to her teasingly, “You were talking to Yianni, Vasilo! What did he want?”

“He was begging me. He was pleading!” she answered.

“But for what, Vasilo, for what?” both girls chorused.

Vasilo only blushed and turned away, ignoring them. Glykeria composed a song for the occasion:

Vasilo came after them with her shepherd’s crook, and the girls scrambled, laughing, toward the small white Chapel of St. Nicholas on the western end of the pasture. They ducked into the shadows behind the rounded projection of the apse. They huddled there, making themselves as small as possible, their bodies pressed against the cool wall, listening to their hearts beating. They soon became aware of another sound, muffled but unmistakable. From inside the Holy of Holies, where only a priest could enter, there came the hollow rhythm of slow, dragging footsteps. Back and forth the walker paced. The sound came closer. The girls stared at each other; despite the heat, there were goose bumps on their arms.

Kanta felt a scream welling up inside her and flinched when Glykeria grabbed her arm and whispered hoarsely, “It’s the ghost of Soterina. This is where she froze to death!” With that, they hurled themselves out of the shadows, as if they could already feel Soterina’s icicle fingers clutching at their necks. They nearly trampled Vasilo, who came puffing toward them.

“Run, Vasilo!” Kanta screamed. “There’s a ghost in the church!”

Vasilo seemed unconcerned. “You girls are sillier than I am! I see ghosts all the time up here, and I always tell them a nice ‘Good day.’ ”

Despite Vasilo’s aplomb, Kanta and Glykeria huddled at the edge of the Agora farthest from the chapel for the rest of the afternoon.

While Eleni was busy in the house, Nikola perfected his plan. After lunch, when everyone settled down for the siesta, he began. The earth in the garden
just below the house was soft from recent rains, but even so, it wasn’t easy for a six-year-old to break it up with the hoe. Next he took a spade and began to dig. An hour later he stopped, and proudly examined the results. He had created a rectangular hole, as long as he was tall, nearly as wide, and a foot deep—the largest he’d ever made.

Eager to finish before his mother woke up, Nikola found a pail and hurried the dozen yards up the path to the spot where the millstream broadened into a shallow pond. It was hard dragging the filled pail back down to the hole, but he struggled manfully and finally tipped it in, only to see the water disappear into the earth.

By five o’clock, after two hours of lugging water, he had achieved two inches of liquid mud in the bottom. It didn’t look like the swimming pools of his fantasies, but he was hot and tired, and his palms were blistered. It was time to take his enjoyment for all the hours of hard labor. He slipped off the straps of the striped knee pants his mother had made him and undid the button in the front. The only other garment was his short-sleeved knitted white shirt, which also served as a nightgown. Now it would be a swimming costume as well. With a shout like an attacking warrior, he threw himself face down into the swimming pool.

Tsavena, the ancient mother of Marina Kolliou, who lived in the house above the Gatzoyiannias family, woke up with an urgent need to go to the outhouse. From the small veranda she heard a strange noise and looked down at the Gatzoyiannis garden. The top half of a chocolate brown figure was projecting out of the dirt. She thought at once of the evil
daoutis
, half goat, half child, who frightens the sheep and goats to death during Advent.

“Ooooohhh, Eleni!” Tsavena screamed in a voice that brought everyone in the neighborhood awake with a start. “Run, Eleni!”

As the neighborhood assembled around his swimming pool, Nikola was doing his best at what he thought must be the backstroke. He looked at the circle of faces peering down at him. Every mouth was stretched wide in laughter. His mother was laughing hardest of all. Nikola felt that his efforts were not being properly appreciated. “I only wanted us to have a swimming pool, like in America,” he said reproachfully, blinking back the tears.

The episode of the swimming pool ended with the excited return of Glykeria and Kanta, while Eleni and Olga were still scraping mud off the boy in the basin used for boiling clothes. Eleni paid no more attention to the girls’ encounter with a ghost than she did to Nikola’s plans for improving his swimming pool. But a week later, as she went up to oversee Tassi Mitros’ plowing of their fields for the second planting, Eleni encountered the ghost herself.

She stopped at the chapel to light a candle to her son’s name giver, and as she stood in front of the altar she saw a movement behind the iconostasis. She peered forward into the Holy of Holies and found the white-haired miller Yiorgi Mitros crouched in a corner. “What are you doing here,
effendi!”
she asked in amazement.

“Hiding from the coming storm, Eleni!” he answered. “Have you seen anyone looking for me?”

“Two men in uniform came around asking for you,” she innocently replied. “But why should you be afraid? You’ve done nothing.”

Yiorgi Mitros’ ruddy cheeks paled and he flung his open hand toward his face, cursing himself. “Damn the day I stood up to speak for ELAS!” he moaned. “Now they’re hunting me down like a hare. And for nothing! I’m heading for Albania right now, Eleni. And for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

Eleni returned home, wondering sadly at the old man’s plight. She found her brother-in-law Andreas in her house.

“You didn’t happen to catch sight of Yiorgi Mitros up in the fields, did you?” he asked.

“Why? What’s he done?”

“Nothing,” Andreas answered, explaining that Minas Stratis, who was now working for army intelligence in Yannina, had recommended the miller Mitros for mayor of Lia. “But no one’s been able to find him for weeks.”

And that was how Yiorgi Mitros sentenced himself to fifteen years of homeless wandering in Albania and Yugoslavia, while the post of mayor fell to the cripple Boukouvalas, who had recovered enough from his beating in the schoolhouse to take the helm of the village.

For everyone who had aligned himself with ELAS, it was a time of fear and flight. There were rumors of night raids and brutal reprisals in the larger towns to the south. One evening at the hour of dusk, Eleni heard a faint knock on the back door and opened it to find her cousin Antonova Paroussis from Babouri standing in the shadows, her scarf tied close around her face. Antonova begged Eleni to hide her cousin Nikola Paroussis (the young ELAS guerrilla who had welcomed Philip Nind) and his comrade Kosta Tzouras. Nikola’s mother was terrified that they’d be arrested and perhaps killed for their wartime activities. “None of the ELAS houses are safe,” Antonova said to Eleni, “but they’d never think to search here because your husband’s in America and your father is a rightist. Please, Eleni, just for a few days until we see whether it’s safe for them to turn themselves in or if they have to flee the country! Do this thing for his mother and me and someday it will be returned to your own son.”

At first Eleni hesitated. She couldn’t compromise Olga’s reputation by hiding single young men under the same roof, but after all, Nikola Paroussis was her husband’s relative, and the other was the brother of Christos’ close friend in America. Her husband would expect her to help them.

“I’ll send Olga to my sister’s house, and keep Costa and Nikola here,” Eleni finally agreed. “They’ve always been good, God-fearing boys.”

She put the two
andartes
in the dirt-floored pantry behind the kitchen, and although they spent the daylight hours in the storage space under the floor, in the evenings the young men would tell the children stories and teach Nikola and Fotini how to play jacks with pebbles.

Two weeks later their hiding came to an end with news that appalled every ELAS supporter. The picaresque Aris Velouchiotis, hero of ELAS, who refused to recognize the Varkiza agreement and still rode the secret mountain passes with his band of savage “Black Bonnets,” was denounced as “an adventurist and suspect person” by the chief of the Communist Party himself on June 12, 1945. Aris did not learn of his excommunication until six days later when, trying to escape from an ambush near a village in the Pindos mountains, he ran into two shepherds, one of whom showed him a six-day-old newspaper.

Aris sat down on a rock with the newspaper, told his second in command to stay with him and sent the rest of his men on ahead. A few minutes later, a grenade exploded. No one would ever know if Aris and his aide committed suicide or were killed. Government soldiers cut off their heads and suspended them from a double gibbet in the main square of Trikala by ropes strung through their ears.

Aris’ repudiation by the Communist Party and his grisly death left no doubt in the minds of ELAS
andartes
still at large. No matter what the party said about confronting the authorities, they streamed over the border into Albania and Yugoslavia to save themselves. The two fugitives hidden in Eleni’s house joined the exodus, crossing over to Albania along with Mitsi Bollis and the Skevis brothers. They stayed in a village just over the border, occasionally creeping back after dark; shadowy figures now and then glimpsed by the children who took them for ghosts. In the fall they left Albania for the base of Greek communists in Bulkes, Yugoslavia.

The first letter that Eleni had written to Christos brought a quick reply, overflowing with relief at the news of their survival. He said that four large trunks full of clothing and gifts were already on their way. Unfortunately, an emergency appendectomy and the cost of all the things he was sending had depleted his bank account, but as soon as he had enough to fulfill the legal requirement for bringing the family into the country, he said, he would send Eleni immigration papers.

Christos’ main concern was his daughters’ virtue once they were exposed to the hedonism of his adopted land. “You have no idea how free the girls are here, running with strangers from an early age, without even a brother along to protect them!” he wrote. “It would be best if you make a match now for Olga with a man of good name in the village and marry her there. Then she’ll be safely settled and after the rest of you come to the States, she can follow with her husband.”

Another responsibility, Eleni thought. Christos didn’t understand how hard it would be to find someone with the right family name and reputation who would satisfy Olga as well. But she had to admit she saw the logic in his plan.

The whole family waited anxiously for the trunks to arrive while they threshed the summer wheat, dug the potatoes and celebrated the three-day
festival of the Prophet Elias. Finally word came from Yannina that the trunks had arrived. Eleni and Andreas went to bring them back by mule. By the time they entered the Gatzoyiannis gate, the yard was full of neighbors. Everyone stood around the trunks exclaiming. Even the rope that bound them was wonderful! It was American rope, strong and thick as a snake, and they carefully untied it so that lengths of it could be given as gifts—not only practical but full of the glamour of the golden land. There were clothes for everyone, even Kitso and Megali, although Foto Gatzoyiannis’ family did not fare as well as before the war. There were bright dresses and lengths of fabric, exotic shoes, scarfs and silk stockings. All of the wealth of America flowed out of those trunks and some of the mystery too. There was a shiny round pink box with a puff on top and powder inside that smelled nice and made you sneeze. There was a large glass bottle full of bright-colored large round tablets. “Sweets,” said some. “Medicine,” said others.