Eleni (36 page)

When they turned up nothing, the
andartes
came back upstairs and began ripping apart the sleeping pallets, tearing linings out of clothing and carting off even the kerosene used to start the fire. Megali crouched in a corner, but when one of the men pocketed a half-eaten piece of bread she shrilled, “Aren’t you going to leave me as much as a crust?” The taller of the two slapped her so hard that she fell sideways, her head thudding against the wall. Megali’s cheek showed the imprint of the guerrilla’s fingers, and blood was trickling from her mouth where her teeth had split the inside of her lip.

Kanta stood up and let the kerchief fall from her face. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, hitting an old lady?” she shouted.

The guerrilla started toward Kanta, warning “Get out of here and shut up, or I’ll give you the same!” Kanta pulled her weeping grandmother out the door and led her up to the Gatzoyiannis house.

When Eleni saw her mother’s face she began to cry. It was decided that Megali should move in with Eleni’s family. Kanta and Glykeria were sent down to bring up the unbaked loaves of bread. When the girls returned, Eleni came out to meet them and was startled to see a column of smoke rising from a house in the lower part of the Perivoli that belonged to Father Theodoros Karapanos, the priest who took over when Father Zisis died in an ELAS prison during the occupation. The new priest was the son of the blind woman, Sophia Karapanou. When Father Theodoros and the other
men of Lia fled the village, old Sophia once again stayed behind. Her daughter-in-law, Eleftheria, remained to look after her, confident that they wouldn’t be harmed because her own brother was one of the approaching
andartes
.

But Spiro Skevis was launching the fulfillment of the second part of his prophecy—that the enemies of the Democratic Army would be punished no matter how far they ran. In every village they captured, the guerrillas began by taking vengeance on the important citizens who chose to flee instead of staying behind to welcome them. In hamlets like Lia, the leading citizens were always the priest, the village president and the schoolteacher. Father Theodoros’ house was the first to be put to the torch, but Eleftheria was given a few minutes’ advance warning because her brother was one of the guerrillas.

The young woman began to rush about, grabbing a photograph, a
velenza
, snatching clothes off the hooks and tugging at a wooden chest full of corn, which she couldn’t budge. Hearing the commotion, the blind woman reached out, trying to catch her hysterical daughter-in-law. “Who is it, child?” Sophia quavered. “Who’s there?”

“We have to leave, Mother!” Eleftheria replied. “They’re going to burn the house!”

“Oh my God, the Germans have come back!” Sophia cried.

“No, it’s not the Germans!”

Sophia crouched by the fireplace and put her apron over her head, rocking back and forth as people hurried by in excitement.

Finally someone stopped and picked Sophia up like a child, carrying her out the door as the guerrillas began pouring kerosene everywhere. Her savior was Angeliki Botsaris, the girl who had worked for the British commandos. She was now Angeliki Daikos, having married an itinerant peddler two years younger than herself. Although she was three months pregnant with her second child, Angeliki carried the blind woman in her arms to her own house and tried to comfort her.

Watching the priest’s house in flames, Eleni shivered, wondering which of the villagers would suffer the guerrillas’ vengeance next. She didn’t have long to wonder. Soon a second finger of smoke rose toward the sky. It was the house of the schoolteacher Demos Bessias.

Spiro Skevis was personally on hand when they set the torch to the house of Minas Stratis. Minas had removed his wife and children from the village long before the guerrillas approached, knowing that Skevis would go to any lengths to punish him for evading them the last time. But Minas’ mother, Christina, insisted on staying behind, hoping to protect the family property.

Before they set the Stratis house afire, Spiro Skevis walked through it, looking with a satisfied smile at the possessions of the man who had always been his rival. Minas had amassed the only library the village had ever seen; a whole wall of books. “So many books; too many for a schoolteacher,” the villagers used to whisper, suspiciously. “Too many even for a professor! Who know, what he really does with all these books?”

Spiro was eager to see Minas’ fine library in flames, but first there was something else he was looking for. He knew that for years Minas had bred rabbits. With scholarly thoroughness he kept notes on their markings, coats and progeny. In the cellar Skevis found Minas’ prize pair of angora rabbits, bought in Yannina to cross-breed with the village strain.

Spiro picked up the quivering balls of fur, their pink eyes rolling back in their heads, and carried them outside. He took a length of leather thong and tied them by the feet, then hung them, kicking and squeaking shrilly, over the saddle of the horse his equerry was holding outside.

These rabbits would be the banner of Minas’ defeat. Spiro mounted his horse, the rabbits dangling in front of him, and signaled to the guerrillas who were waiting for his instructions, torches in their hands. “Burn it!” he shouted, and turned the horse around for his triumphal parade through the village.

As Eleni and her children were watching the smoke of the burning houses, Nitsa arrived, puffing breathlessly up the hill. “Boukouvalas’ house is burning!” she shouted. “Minas’ house has fallen into the cellar. Christina’s just standing there, watching it burn!”

“Poor Christina! Wherever will she live now?” said Eleni, full of pity for her cousin who had already suffered so much.

“She can live in the cooking shed, they haven’t burned that,” Nitsa retorted. “Don’t worry about Christina, she’ll survive. Let me tell you what Skevis did to
me.”

After setting fire to the houses of the four village elders, the guerrillas began seeking out the members of MAY, the civilian security force, who included Nitsa’s husband. Spiro Skevis arrived at Nitsa’s house, where she was sitting on her front step. He told her, in a conversational tone, that he had nearly killed her husband one day, when as a member of a MAY posse, Andreas was hunting in the mountains for ELAS fugitives and stopped just in front of a boulder where Spiro was hiding. “If Andreas had turned around and seen me, you’d be a widow now,” Spiro said with amusement. Nitsa trembled until he got up to leave, certain that he meant it as a warning. As soon as he was out of sight she packed her things and set out for the Perivoli to move in with Eleni.

Now they were a household of three women and five children crowded into two rooms: the kitchen and the small storeroom behind it. The kitchen was only 12 feet square. They had to sleep in heaps like cords of wood. On one side of the fireplace, under one
velenza
, slept Megali and Eleni with Nikola between them. On the other side slept Nitsa, who appropriated the spot next to the fire, as well as Fotini, Olga, Glykeria and Kanta.

Within weeks of the guerrillas’ arrival, life in Lia took on a feverish activity. In order to have their western flank secured before the planned Christmas Day attack on Konitsa, the guerrillas’ orders were “complete and quick preparation.” According to the account of one of the
andartes
, Dimitri
Hadjis, who later became a well-known novelist in Greece, “Here in the Mourgana this meant telephone lines passed over deep ravines and passable roads opened in untrodden heights of the mountains. It also meant steps chiseled into the sides of the rock, machine-gun nests built with beams carried for many hours without the help of machines or even tools—everything by hand.” The women of the village worked alongside the guerrillas, building pillboxes in strategic spots throughout the village with the stones they gathered.

Although everyone suffered under the occupation of the guerrillas, by the second week of December, Eleni began to suspect that she had been singled out for special attention. There was a freezing rain falling when a young
andarte
knocked at her gate and asked if he could come in to dry himself at the fire. She took him into the kitchen and offered him a boiled egg. As he stood near the fireplace, he noticed the photograph of Christos in its shiny brass frame. He asked where her husband was and she explained that he lived in America.

“Look at the gold frames on those glasses!” the young guerrilla said, picking up the photograph. “Do you know how long it would take a workingman to earn enough for such frames? He must be a capitalist and he bought those glasses with the blood of the workers.”

Eleni tensed. “You’re wrong, my child,” she said quickly. “My Christos is a cook in a restaurant owned by someone else.”

“I think he’s a bloodsucker,” the man replied curtly. Then he turned the dime-store frame over and slid the photograph out the back. Behind the black-and-white image of Christos was another picture. Eleni saw to her horror that it was Queen Fredrika, wife of the newly crowned King Paul, who had assumed the throne when his brother George died on April 1, 1947. The young queen stared regally out of the frame, ropes of pearls around her white throat.

The guerrilla turned to Eleni with a triumphant grin. “Look who’s here, Amerikana! Who hid the German bitch for safekeeping? Your father?”

How did this child know about her father’s royalist sympathies? Eleni wondered. “I didn’t even know it was there!” she said. “When Christos sent the photo I gave it to someone who was going to Filiates, to buy a frame for it. You know they sell frames with pictures of kings, queens, war heroes already in them; it must have been there all this time without my knowing it!”

She dismissed the incident as an accident until several days later, when there was a battering on the gate. She opened it to find a tall, chestnut-haired, rather handsome young man in a lieutenant’s uniform who looked at her as if she were an interesting specimen of insect.

He was a thirty-one-year-old former schoolteacher named Sotiris Alexiou who had taken the
nom de guerre
of “Sotiris Drapetis.” The villagers would soon come to know Sotiris as the sadistic intelligence officer for Lia.

Without a word, Sotiris pushed Eleni aside and began charging through the rooms, opening every box or drawer, tossing the contents on the floor, turning mattresses upside down. She realized that someone must have made some kind of report on her.

Eleni rushed ahead of Sotiris into the small pantry behind the kitchen, where Olga was sitting in her usual spot on top of the trunk that held her “inside” dowry, which they had moved out of the good chamber after the arrival of the Gagas family. “Quick, get out of here!” Eleni hissed at her. “He’s coming inside and he’s going to open everything.”

Olga threw a terrified glance at the
velenzes
and blankets from Yannina which she had tied up in tight rolls, and then fled into the kitchen where Glykeria was hiding. Sotiris was right behind her mother. He pulled out a knife and cut the rope holding the
velenzes
, throwing them one by one on the floor and feeling between them.

Tossing the last blanket on the floor, Sotiris turned to Eleni and commanded, “Open this trunk!” She searched frantically for the keys to the padlock—in her pockets; in the niches where she kept matches; in the box of letters from Christos, above the doorjamb; everywhere she kept keys—but she was shaking so much she couldn’t think.

“Hurry up, woman!” Sotiris shouted as she rushed here and there. Disgusted at the delay, he strode into the good chamber and picked up the poker from the fireplace. He returned swinging it. As Eleni backed out, he began beating the padlock with the poker until it broke. In a frenzy now, Sotiris tore everything out of the trunk; dresses, slips, stockings, pillowcases, a crocheted tablecloth. He threw them on the dirt floor and pulled out more until the trunk was empty.

Breathing hard, he turned toward Eleni, who was huddled in the doorway separating the kitchen from the small room. “I’m going to search your yard now, Amerikana,” he said, “and if I find a gun anywhere, I’m going to kill you.”

The words “gun” and “Amerikana” shot through Eleni like icicles. Someone must have told the security police, “The Amerikana has a gun hidden on her property,” and she felt again the separateness that the word “Amerikana” implied. Although she had never left the village, she was the foreigner, the one whose wealthy husband lived in a distant land where his money could never be confiscated. She wondered who had reported her, and how far the hatred reached.

“Have you found any weapons in our house,
effendi?”
she asked. “We have no men, no soldiers here and no weapons. I can guarantee that you’ll find nothing in the house, but I can’t promise about the yard. What if someone has buried a gun there just to get me in trouble?”

Sotiris shrugged. “You’d better pray I don’t find anything. Get me a shovel.”

As soon as he was out the door, Eleni began pacing back and forth. “They’re going to kill us,” she said aloud several times. Then she called
Glykeria out of the kitchen and spat on the floor. “Before the spit dries I want you back here with Sioli Skevis! Tell him our lives depend on it. Thank God I’ve got some meat in the
gastra
! Where are the greens you picked this morning?”

By the time Glykeria returned, out of breath, nearly dragging the leathery old father of Spiro and Prokopi Skevis, the house was filled with the aroma of roasting goat, spiced with oregano and mint. Out in the yard Sotiris was digging holes, helped by two more
andartes
. As soon as Eleni saw Sioli, she began to cry. “Please,
effendi
, look at those men outside! They’re searching for guns. They found nothing in the house, but I’m afraid that someone may have hidden one in the yard.”

Sioli Skevis was a pious old man despite the trick he had played on the archbishop to get Spiro into the school in Vela, and he respected the Amerikana. He patted her shoulder, “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m here, and whatever they find, no one’s going to touch you.” He settled himself into a comfortable corner. “What’s that I smell?” he asked.