Eleni (35 page)

A soft-spoken, paternal yet tough commander who urged his forces to win “by fire and ax,” General Markos chose his words carefully. He argued with Zachariadis that consolidating the army for a positional war would make it vulnerable to the government forces equipped by the Americans and now numbering 170,000 men—six times the size of the DAG.

“This is defeatism! Treason!” shouted Zachariadis. Markos realized that if he didn’t want to end up with his head hanging from a lamppost like Aris’, he would be wise to back down.

The new policy was launched. The party moved its headquarters from Athens to the mountains, put together a cabinet for a provisional government, which it intended to announce on Christmas Eve, and began to plan a Christmas Day attack on the town it had chosen for the seat of the new government. The target was Konitsa, fifty miles from Lia and lying in a pass only twelve miles from the Albanian border between Mount Grammos, base for the bulk of the DAG, and the Mourgana range, which the six battalions of guerrillas had just taken. When guerrillas occupied the Mourgana villages, the women and children who had been left behind by their fleeing husbands and fathers expected that the insurgents would soon move on, as they had in other villages in northern Greece. The villagers didn’t yet realize that the DAG was operating under a new strategy, and that the guerrillas had come to stay.

O
N THE NIGHT
the guerrillas arrived in Lia, they began prowling in packs, pounding at the gates of the houses, demanding firewood, bread and shelter from the frightened villagers. While the intruders stood in the good chamber of the Gatzoyiannis house, warming themselves at the hearth and waiting for Eleni to produce the food they had demanded, Fotini and Nikola peeked at them from the hallway, staring at their ragged uniforms, unkempt beards and their wild eyes, glowing in the firelight.

The next morning more guerrillas came, bringing flour to each house in the Perivoli with orders to bake bread for the troops. “Don’t get any idea about keeping some flour for yourselves,” they warned Eleni. “We’re going to weigh the loaves when you’re finished.”

A few hours later, as Eleni and Olga were kneading dough at the wooden trough, two more
andartes
came and ordered them, when the bread was baked, to cut it up and dry it into rusks, which the guerrillas could take with them without fear of it going moldy. “Hurry it up,” ordered one of the two, a thin, blond man with a tangled, nicotine-stained beard. “A lot of men are moving on to the front.”

He tried to avoid Eleni’s eyes as she studied him. “Why, Nikola!” she exclaimed. “Is that you behind that beard?”

She had recognized Nikola Paroussis, the soft-spoken young kinsman she had hidden in her storeroom, the same polite boy who had taught Nikola and Fotini to play jacks two years before. But now he looked a decade older, his face haggard, weathered by the sun. “Yes, it’s me,” he said with a shrug.

“But, Nikola, child, I never would have known you!” Eleni said. “You look so much older than the boy who stayed here for two weeks, eating with us, playing with the children.”

Nikola was uncomfortable at being reminded of his debt to her. “These are different times, Amerikana,” he said. “We have the fascists on the run now, and we need bread for our boys—quickly!” With that he was gone, leaving Eleni wondering at the change in him.

Within a few days of their arrival, Spiro Skevis set the bells of Holy
Trinity ringing to announce a compulsory gathering in the village square. He was brief, with little of the flowery rhetoric of his brother. The DAG was engaged in a battle for the country’s independence and for the people’s rights, he told the assembled villagers. “You will all have the privilege of taking part in this great struggle.” He looked at the worried faces—nearly all women and children. “Our friends who throw in their lot with us have nothing to fear,” he went on. “But our enemies, who have gone off to collaborate with the monarcho-fascists will not escape our punishment, no matter how far they run.”

If the villagers wondered how they would have a part in the great struggle, they were not long in finding out. Everyone was given a job. Spiro’s first action was to reward the few men who had stayed behind by putting several on the local council to administer the village. At the head of the committee he put Spiro Michopoulos.

Michopoulos was one of the few Liotes who had contracted and survived the most dreaded disease in the mountain villages—tuberculosis. He had contracted it while in his twenties, when he and his brother traveled as itinerant coopers. The treatment for tuberculosis was drastic. The victim was locked in a room, deprived of all company and given his food pushed through a window until he died, whereupon his clothes, bed and possessions were burned and his house decontaminated with smoky fires. Or he was sent up to the highest pastures to live with the animals, sleeping on the ground, drinking milk straight from the ewe, eating fresh meat until the exposure to the elements either killed or cured him.

Spiro had survived by the second method, coming out of it with prematurely gray hair and a lingering weakness that made him unable to continue as a cooper. His brother helped him set up a small store and coffeehouse in the village square, and after Spiro stopped coughing, the Liotes gained enough confidence in his cure to patronize his
cafenion
. During the five years of being treated like a leper, Spiro acquired the deferential manner of one who is not sure his presence is welcome. Without being obtrusive, he was always trying to be helpful in small ways so that he would not be snubbed. To be appointed the head of the whole village was for Spiro Michopoulos an undreamed-of honor.

As Spiro Skevis had promised, all the villagers were given a part: every house billeted guerrillas, every woman cooked for the troops and every child gathered wood for them. Whenever a work force was needed, the slow-witted tinker Petro Papanikolas, who had been the church chanter and was now the town crier, would climb to the hillside above the ravine and shout in his high-pitched voice a verse that he was proud to have composed himself:

The house of Eleni’s friend Olga Venetis, just down the path from hers, had been taken over as a commissary, and the one next door was made into a slaughterhouse, while the families who owned them were evicted.

One of the first orders of the guerrillas was that every family should contribute fifty pounds of corn to the troops. As the women carried their quotas to the new commissary, they were shocked to find that the cattle confiscated by the guerrillas were being stabled inside the Church of St. Demetrios, where the women went almost daily to light candles and pray. Now lowing cows were milling around among the sacred frescoes and icons, the brass candle stands and the gilded wooden iconostasis.

Eleni felt fortunate compared to most of her neighbors because the family of Elias Gagas, a schoolteacher from the nearby town of Vishini, was assigned to her as boarders. When Gagas arrived in civilian clothes, accompanied by his wife, two teen-aged daughters and a young son, Eleni moved her own family’s possessions into the two rooms comprising the old part of the house—the kitchen and the dirt-floor pantry behind it. This gave the boarders the good chamber and the room next to it, which was used as an auxiliary storeroom and sometimes a bedroom.

The newcomers seemed to be polite, well-spoken people. The two daughters, about the same ages as Olga and Kanta, were well-dressed and sophisticated. The little boy, Demitris, who was only a year older than Nikola, was often homesick. Eleni would boil him eggs as a treat, and taking him on her lap, told him fairy stories until his tears dried. When the three Gagas children lined up every night to brush their teeth, Fotini and Nikola stared in fascination at this strange ritual.

Elias Gagas organized the village children under the age of ten into a one-room school, which he conducted in a house on the square, since the schoolhouse remained gutted. There were no desks, books or blackboards, but Gagas could make lessons interesting with only pencils and scraps of paper. Nikola liked learning the Communist songs and hearing stories about their Russian brothers. He stood proudly every morning before the framed pictures of Stalin, Marx, Zachariadis and Markos, to sing:

While the children were receiving a Communist education, their mothers were being summoned nearly every day to the commissary, headed by a former butcher, Dimitris Bolofis, who was called “Hanjaras” for the huge meat cleaver, or
hanjari
, which he wielded.

One day, shortly after the
andartes’
arrival, Petro Papanikolas summoned the women of Lia, one from every house, to set out on a march to Kerasovo, a prosperous village twelve miles to the northeast, to load donkeys with any food, clothing and supplies that they found in the deserted
town for the guerrillas. They would be allowed to keep for themselves any additional spoils they carried on their backs.

When they reached Kerasovo, Eleni and her friend Olga Venetis were surprised to find a ghost town of imposing two-storied stone houses with iron balconies and neat hay sheds and barns. “What idiots we were,” Olga Venetis exclaimed, “staying in Lia to protect our miserable huts when people with houses like these left everything behind to save themselves!”

The women of Lia loaded the mules and their own backs until long after midnight, and then, without stopping for food or rest, they set off toward home. Staggering under their burdens, they arrived at the commissary as dawn was breaking, their muscles cramped with fatigue. Hanjaras was there to greet them. He seemed pleased. “Unload everything right here,” he told them.

“But we were told we’d get to keep what we brought on our backs,” said Rano, her voice loud in the morning hush. “We’ve carried it all night through the mountains.”

Hanjaras’ smile didn’t waver. “That statement has been rescinded,” he said. “We need it all for our fighters.”

From that day the women of Lia mistrusted Hanjaras, but as the dispenser of food to the troops, he was one of the most powerful men in the village. They soon learned to take advantage of the fact that Hanjaras had a soft spot in his heart for children.

All the goods confiscated from stores in invaded towns and villages were sent on to Hanjaras. Among them would be such trifles as chewing gum, sweets, barrettes and charms, hair ribbons and small plastic toys, which he enjoyed handing out to the children of Lia. Nikola and Fotini were among those who hung around the commissary in hopes of a treat from the husky butcher. Fotini carefully collected the small treasures he gave her, keeping them tied in a handkerchief in a secret place.

Whenever the guerrillas slaughtered animals, they threw away the lungs, stomach and intestines, which the village women eyed longingly, for they would have made nourishing soup or sausages. But Hanjaras refused to let them have the scraps. “The Democratic Army does not feed its people offal!” he thundered, tossing it all to the dogs. The women learned that if they sent their children to beg, they would often return triumphantly with a dripping lung or a lamb’s head for the dinner pot.

The wheat which the women had collected in Kerasovo was ground to flour and distributed to each house in the village to bake into loaves of bread. Eleni had Olga to lend a hand, but she knew that her mother would be hard put to it to do so much baking, so she sent Kanta down to the Haidis house to help Megali.

Kanta carefully tied her black kerchief over her head and lower face before she set out. Ever since the arrival of the
andartes
, Eleni had insisted that Olga and Kanta wrap their kerchiefs over the lower part of their faces, before tying them in back, so that only the nose and eyes showed. It was
the way Greek women had always hidden their beauty from invaders, especially from the Turks, who often descended upon the villages, collecting pretty girls for the harems and young men for the sultan’s Janissary guards.

Kanta was naturally pale, but Olga had apple-red cheeks, so Eleni taught her to rub ashes on her face to dull the color. With the black kerchief and her heavy homespun clothes, Olga might have been a stocky grandmother instead of a nubile girl of nineteen. “If anyone asks you why you wear your kerchief that way,” Eleni advised her, “tell them it’s to hide the tumor on your neck.” The tumor wasn’t an invention. Olga, like many in Lia, suffered from goiter due to lack of iodine in the water, and when she was tired, there was a noticeable swelling under one side of her jaw.

Kanta arrived at her grandmother’s house with her kerchief over her face like a Greek nun. Soon she and Megali finished kneading the dough for the
andartes
and set out the loaves to rise under a clean cloth. There was a banging at the door. When Megali opened it she was pushed aside by two
andartes
.

Rumors of the UNRRA supplies which everyone said Kitso had hidden away had reached the ears of the guerrilla officers, and the two men were sent to find and confiscate them. They began by pulling all the foodstuffs out of the small room that was the pantry. Everything that was edible was carried away as Megali and Kanta watched. Then they went below and emptied the handmade barrels and wooden chests of everything Kitso had stored for the winter. They began digging in the dirt floor of the cellar, trying to find his secret cache.