Eleni (31 page)

Dimitri bent first toward his wife and then toward his mother, blown like a reed in a hurricane, and finally he withdrew from the battlefield altogether, returning to the bakery in Khalkis. Local skirmishes then intensified into frequent stormy scenes that culminated with Stavroula rushing home to pour out her grief to her mother, who would nervously send her right back. While Stavroula’s girl friends took her side—after all, she was pregnant, poor thing!—most of the married women clucked and agreed that this is what comes of young people choosing their own mates.

Eleni noticed that Olga consistently sided with Stavroula and decided it was time to lecture her on proper behavior for a bride, for her oldest daughter already showed distressing signs of willfulness.

“When you get married,” Eleni told her, “I want your in-laws to congratulate me for bringing up such a bride. Whatever your husband or mother-in-law
tells you to do is law. No grumbling! You must never tell secrets that you hear in your mother-in-law’s house, not even to me. I don’t want the kind of shame Stavroula is heaping on poor Anastasia.”

Olga listened dutifully and promised to add luster to the Gatzoyiannis name through her conduct, but Eleni knew that her first child was a bit spoiled and tried to warn her of the traps ahead.

“Your mother-in-law will test your honesty by dropping a coin on the floor to see what happens when you’re sweeping and find it, so be sure to give it to her at once instead of putting it in your pocket,” she admonished.

Christos owned a large piece of forest land below the village which was to be divided among the girls as part of their dowries, and Eleni always warned them, as they went to collect firewood there, “Go in deep and cut the wood from the difficult places now, so that when you’re married and pregnant like Stavroula and your mother-in-law sends you for wood, then you can cut from the easy places.”

In the village it was believed that the less an innocent girl knew about sex, the better, but Eleni ventured to broach the subject with Olga, for she knew the damage a harsh sexual initiation could do. There was a girl from the nearby village of Kostana who had become the subject of a bawdy popular song on such an occasion. The girl, named Milia, had been taken by her mother on a trip to the village of Lista, where, to her complete surprise, her mother wed her to a middle-aged widower named Stefo.

On the wedding night the bride’s mother slept on the first floor below the newlyweds’ room before returning to Kostana. Shortly after everyone retired, terrible screams issued from the bridal chamber. “Mother, Mother, come and save me!” screamed Milia piteously. “This man is a devil! He’s got a big red intestine between his legs and he’s trying to stab me with it!”

Louder and louder she implored her mother to help her and at each outburst the embarrassed woman would bellow from downstairs, “Hit her in the mouth, Stefo!” The uproar so entertained the neighbors that they composed a song called “The Big Red Intestine,” with a rousing chorus of “Hit her in the mouth, Stefo!” and the tale of the unhappy wedding night quickly spread throughout the Mourgana villages.

Eleni had come to her own wedding night nearly as innocent as the unfortunate Milia, and the next morning she arose from the nuptial bed, and without a word to anyone, set out to return to her parents’ home. She was convinced she could never endure such an ordeal a second time.

But as Eleni grimly walked from her new husband’s neighborhood toward the Haidis house, she ran into her cousin Tassia Makos, one of the three ill-starred daughters-in-law of the infamous Kostena Makos. When Tassia asked where she was going, and Eleni replied that she was leaving her husband of less than twenty-four hours, the older girl smiled sadly, her face marked by her mother-in-law’s blows. “You might as well turn around and go right back, Eleni,” she said. “Everyone would laugh at you if you came home now, and your father would skin you alive!”

Later, when Eleni was the mother of five children and told the story of her momentary rebellion to her neighbor Olga Venetis, her friend chuckled, as married village women always do at such confessions, and said that it took her own husband eight days of siege before he could conquer her unwilling virginity.

Thinking of all the unhappy sexual initiations, Eleni sat Olga down one afternoon when the other children were out of the house. Taking a deep breath and searching for the right words, she warned her that after she was married, her husband would expect her to do things with him in bed that might frighten her. She told Olga about her own qualms on the morning after her wedding and added consolingly, “In time you’ll get used to it and even begin to enjoy it.”

Olga wasted no time worrying about the mysteries of the marriage bed, however. As far as she was concerned, being married meant buying beautiful things for her dowry, receiving the wedding crown in her flattering red bridal dress, leading the village in the wedding dances, and settling down with a husband so wealthy and respected that all her friends from the washing pond would be consumed with jealousy. Olga had decided that she would settle for nothing less than a teacher, doctor or lawyer as a husband.

She didn’t waver in her resolution, despite Eleni’s constant reminders that the only teacher living in Lia was already married, and there was not a doctor or lawyer within miles of the village. Her mother wearily pleaded with her to consider one of the better families of tinkers, merchants or millers in Lia, but Olga raised her chin, clicked her tongue and said she would never compromise.

Olga was besieged by many swains, but she gave them all short shrift. Poor Sotiris Botsaris, a good-looking lad but only a tinker, mooned around the Gatzoyiannis gate, hiding notes under stones where everyone could find them (“I love you, when can we meet?”) until Eleni became so angry that she waylaid him on the path and threatened to dump a pail of goat’s dung on his head the next time he tried to leave compromising notes on her daughter’s doorstep.

So many eager go-betweens arrived at Eleni’s door, hymning the virtues of this potential husband or that one, that she became heartily sick of the whole subject of Olga’s engagement. At each name that was suggested, Olga turned up her nose, while thirteen-year-old Kanta eagerly piped up, “Then I’ll take him!” Eleni would dramatically throw open the door and tell Olga to take herself off to the convent of Yeromeri. “Black one!” she raged. “If you don’t get married, I’ll marry Kanta and let you be an old maid!”

While Eleni grappled with Olga’s stubbornness, the villagers of Lia and all of Greece faced the referendum on the monarchy on September 1. Partly as a result of pressure from the security forces, 68.7 percent of the electorate voted in favor of King George. The return of the monarch on September 27
increased the number and ferocity of attacks by the guerrillas on villages in Macedonia. In each case the local police would be attacked and killed, their commander mutilated, and rightists executed.

The number of guerrillas fighting under General Markos Vafiadis reached 13,000 by the fall of 1946, partly due to forced conscription of villagers, and by December the general had organized his army into regional commands, including one for Epiros. These forces were renamed the Democratic Army of Greece, or its acronym, the DAG.

The Liotes learned that Spiro Skevis and his followers were among those fighting, but the former ELAS sympathizers who had remained in the village were, for the most part, involved in their peacetime lives and reluctant to go to the mountains again to join him. As one former Skevis guerrilla put it: “The gun is heavy.”

In March of 1947 President Harry Truman announced that the United States was granting Greece $300 million to fight the Communist insurrection supported by its Communist neighbors. The Truman Doctrine stirred up anti-American feelings in Lia, which overflowed onto “the Amerikana” in their midst.

The hostility toward Americans aroused by the Truman Doctrine did not diminish the stream of suitors for Olga’s hand, however; and Olga’s refusal to consider any of them was driving Eleni to distraction. If only she would say yes, everything could be set in motion: the dowry purchased, the wedding arranged, and Olga settled in a house in Athens or Lia. Then the rest of the family would be free to emigrate. Olga would no doubt come to America a year or so later, bringing her husband and perhaps a tiny grandchild. Eleni castigated herself for letting Olga veto the choice of a groom, but she was too soft-hearted to force her eldest child to marry a man she didn’t want, and Christos was not around to knock sense into the girl’s head.

Unable to stand the uncertainty, Eleni decided to do something that nearly every woman in Lia had done at some point in her life—usually when agonizing over a question of romance or marriage. Eleni resolved to visit the woman named Konstantina Ballou, who lived in a hovel almost two hours’ walk away. The fat, stooped old hag was known to everyone in the Mourgana villages as “Flijanou” for her uncanny ability to read one’s fortune in the dried grounds left in the coffee cup, the
flijani
.

Every Greek village was full of old women who claimed to be able to read the future in coffee grounds, but none could equal the clairvoyance of Flijanou. When going to consult her, the village women always pretended they were only setting off to cut shrubbery for the animals. Eleni, too, told no one except her family of her quest, but she agreed to let Kanta make the long walk with her while Olga stayed behind with the younger children.

On the morning they set out, Eleni folded enough finely ground coffee
in a piece of paper to make two cups, one for the Flijanou and one for herself, and put it in her apron pocket. By noontime she was seated in the shabby one-room shack crowded with offerings of walnuts, corn and tomatoes left by clients who had no money to pay for readings.

Deftly the old woman filled the long-handled copper coffee pot with coffee, sugar and water and then held it over the fire until the brew foamed up and filled the room with a rich aroma. She poured cups for Eleni and herself, and as the two women sipped, they chatted of inconsequential matters, Eleni being careful to give away no personal details.

When Eleni had drunk her coffee down to the layer of thick muddy grounds, the Flijanou took it and sloshed the residue around a bit to make sure it was evenly distributed. Then she nodded at her client, who turned the cup upside down into the saucer, letting the liquid coat the insides. Quickly the Flijanou inscribed the cross three times on top of the overturned cup with her bony fingers. They chatted for several minutes more until the grounds were certain to have dried and marked the cup with arabesques and designs like frost etchings on a winter window.

Eleni always felt a stab of worry when someone held her cup up to the light to read it, although, she told herself, she didn’t really believe in fortunetelling. The old woman frowned as she turned the cup between her gnarled, dirt-stained hands. She pursed her lips and softly muttered, “Po! Po! Po!” Then she set down the cup and looked at Eleni.

“It’s not a good cup, my dear, I’m sorry to say.”

“What do you see there, old woman?” Eleni snapped. “It’s my daughter I want to know about.”

The old woman picked up the cup again and held it close to her eyes. “I see you have four daughters,” she said. “Here is the oldest one.” She pointed, but to Eleni it looked like nothing but coffee grounds. “You want to know whom she’ll marry. But the cup shows that the man is not someone she knows now and he does not yet know her. He’ll swoop down and take her like an eagle takes a hen.”

“Why is it a bad cup?” Eleni asked.

The Medusa-haired old woman shook her head and peered into it again. “I’m sorry, my sweet, but I see your house empty and everyone gone within a year’s time.”

Eleni’s heart leaped. “But that must mean my husband will take us to America!” she exclaimed.

The old woman shook her head again. “No, I see bad things here. The head of the household is gone. The house is empty. I see death … within a year’s time.”

Eleni felt her skin prickle and thought, Christos will die, and we’ll be left destitute!

The next instant she was furious with herself for listening to the old hag’s nonsense. “I ask you whom my daughter will marry, and you give me enigmas and lies!” she shouted.

“I’m sorry, dear,” protested the Flijanou. “I never like to see a bad cup, but I don’t tell you just what you want to hear, as other women do. Perhaps if we try again in three months’ time, we’ll see a better cup.”

She held out her hand.

Angrily, Eleni put a few coins in it and hurried out of the gate to where Kanta was waiting, tossing pebbles into the great drop below. The girl asked what the Flijanou had said, and Eleni told her, adding that the woman was a charlatan. But Kanta could see that her mother was upset, for all the way home she alternated between worrying aloud that Christos would die and speculating on the unknown eagle who would carry Olga away.

Soon after the visit to the Flijanou, the postman, Sotiris Venetis, brought a brown envelope for Eleni which he did not leave at Michopoulos’
cafenion
but carried up the mountain path to her door. He required her signature before turning it over to her, and it bore the embossed eagle stamp of the United States Embassy in Athens. Eleni opened the thick packet and stared at the pages of words, printed in both Greek and foreign letters that writhed like serpents. She imagined she could feel a current flowing from the papers through her fingers, for they held the power to transport her family from Lia to the golden land.

The attached letter informed her that a petition had been filed for herself and her children to immigrate, and that she must have the enclosed papers filled out, notarized and submitted to the embassy along with documents proving birth and relationship of each individual to the American citizen. Eleni trembled, remembering that all the official papers of the village had been burned when the Germans set fire to the schoolhouse. But when she went to see the new president of Lia, the cripple Yiorgos Boukouvalas, he assured her that he could issue her substitutes. When these were ready, she set out on the long trip to Filiates to have the papers filled in and stamped by the town’s notary.