Eleni (4 page)

Did he recall the chief judge in the Epiros Command? I asked.

Yes, a man named Anagnostakis, he replied, who had unfortunately just died.

There was another judge whom the people remembered as Katis, I prompted, but it seemed that he had died in exile.

“Oh no, he isn’t dead,” Gastis said casually. Katis was alive somewhere in Athens, he thought. Of course, Katis wasn’t his real name, he continued, but a corruption of the word for “judge.”

I hoped my excitement didn’t show as Gastis sat smiling, jiggling one slippered foot, pleased at the breadth of his knowledge. When I got control of my voice I asked if he happened to recall the real name of Katis.

“Lykas,” he replied promptly. “Achilleas Lykas.”

The man who had prosecuted and sentenced my mother to death and supervised her torture was suddenly resurrected and put within my reach. While I considered this unexpected stroke of luck, Gastis went on talking, saying that I really should speak to Lykas as part of my research; he had presided at an important trial in Tsamanta when a number of captured officers of the nationalist forces were condemned to the firing squad.

As a rumble of thunder rolled over the house, presaging a rainstorm, I stood up and thanked Gastis for his time. He was delighted to have been of some help, he said, extending his hand. He had a last piece of advice for me: if I wanted to learn details of the military operations in the Mourgana during the war, I should stop on my way back through Yannina and interview the then chief of staff of the entire Epiros Command, Major General Yiorgos Kalianesis. I’d have no trouble finding him, Gastis said, because the former guerrilla general now worked as a night clerk in a small tourist hotel, Hotel Alexios. He was on duty there every night.

I wrote down the address and hurried out into a pelting rain, still stunned by the news that the judge who sentenced my mother was alive. As soon as I was out of sight of the village I pulled off the road. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t see where I was going. I turned off the ignition and sat there for a long time, wondering whether I would finally meet the man called Katis, and if I did, what I would do to him.

When I reached Yannina I took Gastis’ advice and walked toward the Hotel Alexios. Once, as a boy, I had glimpsed Kalianesis, the military commander of the Epiros guerrilla army, in the midst of a critical battle in 1948, and the impression he made was still strong. The government soldiers were approaching, threatening to wrest our village from the Communists, and the guerrilla commanders decided to move their headquarters higher up the mountain for safety, above the house where I lived. Kalianesis passed right by our gate. As I stood there with my mother, searching the commander’s face for a clue to the outcome of the battle below, I was dazzled by the imposing, bulldoglike figure of Kalianesis, his fine horse, his gleaming pistols and accoutrements and the deference of the retinue of guerrillas around him. At the age of eight I thought he was the epitome of power and success.

When I entered the dingy hotel lobby and found Kalianesis stationed behind the desk, he was still a powerful figure despite his bald pate fringed with gray hair, his rolled shirtsleeves and wrinkled slacks. His small brown eyes were buried in a heavily jowled face over a thick neck, which disappeared into a massive torso. His receding forehead bore depressions like thumbprints—the scars of shrapnel wounds. He reminded me of an aging gangland enforcer, still capable of breaking a man in two with his hands.

But Kalianesis showed none of the suspicious reticence of other guerrillas I interviewed. As soon as I mentioned that Gastis had sent me, his eyes brightened. He eagerly launched into a recitation of his military triumphs
in the Mourgana. The former major general now commanded nothing more than the rows of room keys hanging behind him and he was delighted to relive his past glory for an interested stranger.

Kalianesis was a living textbook on the military campaigns of the guerrilla army in my section of Greece during the civil war. That night, and in subsequent conversations, he provided me with invaluable information about the conduct of battles and the squabbles and ambitions of the Communist Party leaders who directed the war. Kalianesis resented bitterly that, as one of the few Communist generals with a real military education, he was reduced to listening to the complaints of scruffy tourists all night long in a third-rate hotel while the men who were his classmates at the Greek equivalent of West Point and became generals for the other side now enjoyed retirement on large pensions.

I was disappointed to learn that Kalianesis had been transferred from our area two months before my mother’s execution, so he couldn’t provide any firsthand details of her trial. He made it clear that such civilian trials were not within his purview; he directed the military side, while the administration of guerrilla justice was the responsibility of the political commissar in Epiros, Kostas Koliyiannis, who had died in exile in 1979. But there was a judge still living who presided over many such trials, he said, “a man named Lykas, although everyone called him Katis.”

I tried to maintain an expression of scholarly interest as I said I would very much like to talk to this Lykas, if only I knew where to find him. I had heard he lived in Athens. Kalianesis’ jowls arranged themselves into a grin; he was delighted to be of service. “He’s not in Athens, he lives right here in Yannina,” he said. “I see him walking around sometimes. In fact, Lykas lives only a few blocks away. I don’t know the exact address, but he has an apartment on Napoleon Zervas Street.”

I could hardly absorb this new revelation. The hunt that was at a standstill only two days before had climaxed so suddenly that I wasn’t prepared. I thanked Kalianesis and hurried out into the fragrant summer night. Walking over toward the busy thoroughfare Kalianesis had mentioned, I considered the irony of Katis’ address: he lived on a street named for the greatest enemy of the guerrillas during the occupation: Napoleon Zervas.

I began going from door to door, reading the names posted beside the bells at each apartment house, looking for the one I wanted. Finally I found it in a modern six-story building. Lykas lived on the fourth floor of 46 Napoleon Zervas Street.

I retreated to the edge of the pavement and stared up at his apartment, where a lamp was burning behind curtained windows. I imagined Katis sitting there in the security of his living room, sleek and complacent like the other judge I had just interviewed, confident that his war crimes were buried in the past. I wanted to knock on his door, push my way inside and show him that someone still remembered what he had done in Lia.

My rational side reminded me that I had no idea who lived up there with
him. I could hardly burst in, without even a weapon, and attack him. Everything I had learned so far suggested that Katis was the one person still alive who held the greatest guilt for my mother’s murder, but as an investigative reporter I had to learn the exact degree of Katis’ culpability. Was he the initiator of her torture and execution or an involuntary agent of others? I had to decide what punishment would be commensurate with his crimes and at the same time sufficient to appease my own need for revenge. I needed to gather more evidence and form a plan of attack. That’s why I stood on the sidewalk and watched the window until it went dark; then I turned away and walked off through Yannina to take a hotel room, where I sat up most of the night, trying to decide what to do.

By morning only one thing was clear: I was going back to my village. I had to return to the places where my mother lived and died, to think things through. Heading out of Yannina, I came to a fork in the highway and impulsively turned north. The road on the left led toward my village, but I remembered that the right-hand one led to the village of Mavronoron, the home of the young woman, Despo, who tried to kill herself in the cellar prison by driving a nail into her abdomen. I felt a compulsion to learn if anyone remembered Despo and could tell me at least her full name.

Past ever smaller villages, where storks nested on chimneys and telephone poles, I continued north on a dirt road until I reached a jumble of houses and a large church. I asked a group of women in the churchyard if they knew the name of someone called Despo who disappeared from the village during the war. They clucked and sighed as if it had been yesterday. Her name was Despina Tassis, they said. She left two little motherless boys—grown-up now and living in Athens—but Despo’s husband was still around. I could find him outside the coffeehouse playing cards with the other men.

When I spoke to some of the men gathered around the card tables, the tall, unsmiling figure of Stephanos Tassis rose and followed me out of earshot of the others. I told him about my interest in the war and my mother’s fate, and said that I had recently talked to a woman who was in prison with his wife.

He showed little interest in my statement, although he told me this was the first concrete news of his wife since her disappearance thirty-two years before. He told me that their two sons had been four and two years old when everyone fled the village of Mavronoron in the wake of the invading guerrillas. But after a while the family, living as refugees in Yannina, had nothing to eat. Despo sneaked back to their village to get some corn she had hidden in their house, and was never seen again. Seven years after Despo’s disappearance, Stephanos Tassis managed with much difficulty to find a priest willing to marry him to another village woman, even though there was no proof of his first wife’s death.

It wasn’t easy wringing answers from the taciturn man in front of me. Clearly, he had no interest in learning about Despo’s last days, so I didn’t elaborate. I could see that he didn’t want the ghost of his first wife intruding
on the life he had built for himself since the war. His eyes strayed back to the card game.

If ever he or his sons wanted to learn more, I said, I could put them in touch with the woman who shared Despo’s imprisonment. I wrote down my address and telephone number on a piece of paper. Stephanos Tassis scarcely glanced at it as he put it in his pocket and pointedly wished me goodbye.

I felt angry, almost personally injured, by the indifference of Despo’s husband. In my uncertainty over what to do about my mother’s death, I had sought out someone who was similarly bereaved, only to learn that not only did he intend to do nothing about his wife’s murder, he didn’t even want to be reminded of it.

Later I would find many more victims of the guerrillas like him. In the course of hunting down the identities of my mother’s killers, I uncovered the names and addresses of guerrillas who had killed other civilians and I confronted many of their survivors with details about the murderers. In each case I was met with apathy and rationalization. “Don’t tell me where he is, because I might feel compelled to do something to him,” said a postman whose father was shot dead by a guerrilla intelligence officer as he stood in his own field and refused to inform on his neighbors. “Let God punish the guilty,” said a man who, as an eight-year-old boy, had watched his mother condemned to death for refusing to give up her children to be sent to the Iron Curtain countries. “The government should bring them to justice,” muttered a third, who saw his parents executed in the churchyard of his village while the guerrillas warned him that he would die too if he made a sound.

These excuses kindled in me a growing disgust, rage and despair. Thousands of innocent people like my mother had been killed during the war and now their murderers were living in Greece, their sleep untroubled by fear of reprisals. Just one act of vengeance against the men who now bragged of their war exploits would have made all of them feel a little of the anguish they had inflicted on their victims. But not one father, husband or son had found the will to do it.

My dark mood evoked by the apathy of Despo’s husband lifted a little as I drove toward my own village. Whenever I crossed the narrow bridge over the Kalamas River, which isolates the Mourgana mountains, I felt a comforting sense of returning to my childhood, of coming home.

From the river the road leads up, past waterfalls, ruined mills and white chapels perched on sheer cliffs, around hairpin turns and through tiny villages scattered like pebbles, until the asphalt ends in a bone-rattling path leading ever higher, through the hiding places of mountain goats and wild boar, to the edge of the timberline where the gray slate roofs of Lia become visible nestled among the scrub pine and holm oak of my village.

Bare light bulbs now hang inside the stone huts, testament to the power lines that reached Lia in 1965, but from the road—another recent incursion
of civilization—the village still looks as primitive as the day I walked out of it thirty-three years ago.

As I drove past the Church of Aghia Paraskevi (St. Friday) on the easternmost boundary of the village, the grizzled shepherds surrounded by their goats and the black-clad grandmothers bent under loads of kindling shouted greetings to me.

The pleasure of these familiar sights dissolved when I noticed the stooped, white-haired figure of Christos Skevis at work in his yard. In 1948, when my mother and the others were killed, Skevis was one of the villagers who methodically went around to the houses of the victims and stole the last remaining pieces of food from the survivors, among them my fourteen-year-old sister.

In those climactic days of the war, close relatives and neighbors turned against us. The handful of villagers who had the courage to speak up for my mother at her trial and who tried to console my sister after her execution were not the ones we had always considered our friends. In some cases her defenders were well-known Communists, but they transcended political beliefs and fear for their own safety because they refused to speak against innocent people. But for the most part, our neighbors avoided or betrayed my mother in hope of improving their own chance of survival.

As I drove toward the central square, I kept hearing over the sound of the car’s engine a phrase that my sister and my father had repeated a hundred times:
“Tin fagane i horiani”
—“It was the villagers who devoured her.” To my family, the Communist guerrillas like Katis were an impersonal act of God, unleashed on our village by war, like a plague. It was our neighbors whom they held responsible for my mother’s death; the villagers who whispered secrets to the security police and testified against her at the trial.