Eleni (40 page)

“Why does the family of Minas Stratis eat meat, when all you have is corn mush?” Alekos thundered. “Why does the Amerikana have a four-room villa, while the Yakou family lives in a one-room hovel? After the revolution, everyone will eat the same food, and if a family has three rooms, we’ll give one of them to the poor.”

Kanta could feel the accusing eyes of the girls around her. She suspected that they were beginning to think of her family as part of the nettles that had to be cut before the grass could grow.

She protected herself by not listening. As soon as Alekos started pounding away with his favorite clichés, she wrapped herself back in her daydream. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in her mother’s yeast-scented kitchen, working the churn, watching the golden crust of cream and globules of yellow butter rising to the surface of the milk.

Kanta didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep sitting up until a stinging slap from Alekos knocked her sideways. “Are we boring you, so that you take a nap during the lecture?” he inquired solicitously. “If you find the goals of the Democratic Army so dull, perhaps you’d like to pass the time running up to the peak of Prophet Elias and back?” He pointed to the tiny chapel that crowned the mountaintop above them and shifted his gun. “Get on with it!” he snapped. “Run now, and don’t slow down! We’ll be watching you from here.”

Kanta saw the expectant eyes of the girls, some mocking, some sympathetic. No one believed she could make it so far up and back. She stood up and began to run, barefoot as she was. Soon she was scrabbling on her hands and knees up the sheer mountainside, clutching at bushes, her body shuddering with the hunger for oxygen, the edge of her mind conscious of the painful cuts on her knees and feet. She knew if she fell she would not get up again, and bit her lip until it bled to concentrate her energy and make herself keep moving. She had to show them that she couldn’t be broken. When Kanta finally staggered back into the churchyard, some of the girls noticed a small triumphant smile on her face before she collapsed.

•  •  •

If Eleni had been outside in the yard that day and glanced toward the peak of the Prophet, she would have seen her daughter’s punishment, but instead she was in the kitchen, brooding.

It had quickly become apparent that Petritis’ presence was going to make life miserable for the Gatzoyiannis family. They were confined to the two small rooms—the kitchen and pantry—that composed the original section of the house. Every night their sleep was broken by Petritis’ voice shouting over the telephone and by the heavy tread of couriers. When the war news was bad, Petritis made everyone around him pay. Eleni was constantly warned to keep the children quiet, or see them punished.

The worst part was the sight and smell of the food prepared by Petritis’ orderly, a young man named Christos. The family was living on corn meal, beans and milk because the guerrillas had confiscated most of their winter supplies. One night the orderly prepared a huge pot of spaghetti for the officers while Fotini and Nikola hovered hungrily at the kitchen door, watching every move. First he boiled the spaghetti, then he fried it in a pan of sizzling butter and sprinkled it with a blizzard of cheese. Eleni looked in from the pantry and saw the expressions on the children’s faces. “Please, Comrade Christos,” she asked. “Couldn’t the young ones have a tiny bite? They haven’t seen spaghetti since before the war.”

“Hush, woman, before Colonel Petritis hears!” hissed the young guerrilla, looking over his shoulder. “I can’t have a strand of it myself, much less give any to your children! Now, get them out of here before we all get in trouble!”

Nikola saw the anger and helplessness on his mother’s face as she made a fierce gesture to the children, ordering them into the pantry. She warned them in a whisper never to set foot in the kitchen again when the orderly was there. Nikola felt her pain and wished he were a man so he could protect her from the cruelties of the tyrannical little colonel who had usurped his father’s brass bed and ordered his mother about like a servant.

It was a day or so later that Eleni heard Petritis shouting and saw all the guards being summoned into his office before he stormed out the door. Soon, Eleni was called into the good chamber by Antonis.

Some of Colonel Petritis’ belongings were missing, the aide told her; small things, but potentially dangerous in the hands of an enemy: bullets, a razor, even some tobacco. The colonel suspected there was a traitor among his men, not all of whom were volunteers. He was going to conduct an exhaustive inquiry.

Antonis waited for a moment, then added that it seemed odd for the thief to have taken the colonel’s razor and tobacco. Perhaps it was only a child’s prank. Eleni stiffened. “My children wouldn’t touch his things.” she said coldly. “Colonel Petritis is a guest in our house.”

“Ask them, anyway,” Antonis persisted. “It would be tragic if innocent men suffered as the result of a child’s joke.”

Eleni could see that he was as frightened as she was. She went to the window and shouted for the children to come in. The note of panic in her voice brought them all at a run.

Gathering them in the kitchen, Eleni explained what had happened. She noticed that Nikola, unlike the girls, avoided her eyes and became very busy with the fireplace poker. She called him to her and took both his hands.

“You know that Colonel Petritis is a very powerful man, don’t you?” she asked. He nodded, not meeting her gaze.

“You wouldn’t want him to hurt Kanta, would you?”

Nikola looked at her, a spark of cunning in his eyes. “If he got his things back,” he asked, “would he let Kanta come home?”

Eleni hid her panic and kept her voice calm as she pleaded and coaxed. Though it took nearly a quarter of an hour, in the end he confessed.

As the neighbors returned home for the noon meal they saw a strange procession, led by Nikola and made up of his mother, Antonis and Petritis, and half a dozen guerrillas with shovels, all very solemn.

It took only a few minutes to unearth the plunder in the lower garden under Nikola’s shamefaced instructions. One of the guerrillas reached into the hole and picked up a soggy brown sock bulging with lumps. Antonis shook it out on the ground and everyone turned to look at the boy.

Suddenly Eleni grabbed her son by the ear, twisted it and began shouting, “You little beast! You black devil! Why would you touch the colonel’s things? An honored guest in our house and you act like this!” She drew back her hand and slapped him across the face, her fingers leaving red welts.

It was the only time she ever hit me. The pain was eclipsed by the shock—the total incredibility—of the realization that she could turn on me. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing my tears. She had failed to understand that it was all done for her; my revenge on the man who had tyrannized and frightened her. She was blind to my devotion. She even slapped and humiliated me in front of the enemy. I went away to lick my wounds in my private hiding place, and not until years later did I come to the realization that she had attacked me first, hoping to defuse the punishment that Petritis was preparing for me.

It worked. Petritis confined himself to a warning: “From now on, your family will stay on your side of the house and you’ll keep your children in line,
Kyria
, or there will be very unpleasant consequences.” It was clear to Eleni that Nikola’s prank had ruined her chances of ever convincing the colonel to have Kanta released. She walked wearily back to the house, through a bleak December landscape the color of a charcoal drawing that reflected her despair.

By the time Eleni reached the door, a faint last hope had occurred to her.
The bearded young guerrilla, Nikola Paroussis, had stormed out the door when she reminded him how she hid him during the occupation. But that didn’t alter the fact that he owed her a debt.

About a week after they were taken from their homes, the women recruits were submitted to one more indignity; the one they had been fearing from the start. They were each handed a khaki uniform, many of them bloodstained and worn, evidently taken from dead bodies. From now on, they were told, they would put aside women’s clothes and dress like fighters of the Democratic Army—in pants. Some giggled but most blushed with embarrassment as they put on the baggy trousers. The smaller girls, like Kanta, had to roll up the legs several times before tucking them into the heavy, cleated boots.

Kanta would as readily have walked across the village square in her shift as in pants, but to her surprise a few of the girls seemed pleased by their new regalia, imitating the strut of the men, hefting their guns in a self-conscious mimicry of toughness. Girls like Rano and Milia Drouboyiannis seemed to put away their maidenly demeanor with the full-skirted wool dresses they had worn all their lives.

Their instructors informed them that the afternoon’s indoctrination lesson would be replaced by a display of dancing in the village square. The
andartinas
would dance in their new uniforms, their guns over their shoulders. They were ordered to smile, to show how happy they were to be fighters in the Democratic Army.

As the church bells summoned everyone to the square, the
andartinas
huddled together for protection. When the villagers began to arrive, they stared at the spectacle of the local girls in their shameless apparel. Eleni came with her next-door neighbor, and searched frantically until she saw Kanta, trying to hide herself behind Rano. It was the nearest she had been to her daughter since the girl was taken.

Frixos arranged the nervous women in a line, putting Kanta, the smallest, at the end. When everyone was assembled, the male guerrillas began to sing, clapping their hands to the martial rhythm of the revolutionary songs. “Today, today, today,” they shouted, “the warriors stand like lions! Today, today, today, the women stand like cypresses …”

At a sign from Alekos, the girl in the lead, holding a white handkerchief, began the quick steps of the
kalamatianos;
three paces to the right, two to the left and then a dipping step back before the line snaked forward again. With her right hand on the shoulder of the girl ahead of her, Kanta was thrown off balance by the weight of the gun on her back. Her palms were wet and she couldn’t keep up. Crimson-faced, she left the line and sidled over to Frixos. “Please, Comrade Sergeant, can I dance without the gun?” she asked.

Angrily he mentioned her back toward the line. “You have to think of
the gun as part of your body,” he ordered. “Now get back there and don’t forget to smile.”

Kanta did her best, her face frozen in a grimace, but she kept losing the step and scurrying to keep up. She saw her mother in front of the crowd, her face full of pain.

The line wound into a spiral and Kanta was pulled past the astonished faces of the villagers. When she came near her mother, Eleni’s hands reached out, as if to help her. The expression on her mother’s face told Kanta what she must look like in the obscene trousers. The girl dropped her head and Eleni saw her daughter’s tears falling on the ground.

Several days before Christmas, the activity around Petritis became frenzied; grim, battle-soiled guerrillas arriving in the night, muffled arguments, much shouting. Eleni felt as if a thunderstorm was brewing. One night she heard Petritis bellowing into the field telephone, “We’ll send all we can, but we have to keep enough to protect our own positions.”

A few days later, several units of guerrillas collected in the village square, their equipment on their backs and on confiscated donkeys. Under the worried eyes of the villagers, they filed up the mountain to the northeast, passing out of sight over the peak of the Prophet Elias. It was clear that a major battle was looming, but where?

On Christmas Day the
andartinas
were put through their exercises as usual, but their instructors seemed distracted. The women heard enough to sense that something important was happening. No one told them that the guerrillas, under the eyes of General Markos, had launched the first major battle of the civil war that morning at Konitsa. Messengers from Petritis arrived at the training ground throughout the day, whispering in the ears of Alekos and Frixos, who seemed pleased with what they heard. The women went to sleep that night amid whispered rumors and speculation.

The next morning they awoke before dawn to hear the rumble of battle in the foothills below Lia and on the three heights that formed the opposite rim of the bowl, where the guerrillas had their forward lines. As the girls tumbled outside, they could see the smoke and fire of battles far to the south. Like spectators at the top of an amphitheater, they watched the red flare of mortars, the angry, erratic flash of machine guns, and the occasional, graceful arc of a blue flare. In order to divert the Mourgana guerrillas from sending reinforcements to Konitsa, the government troops had engaged the Communists in skirmishes in the foothills.

That night the
andartinas
were ordered to pack; they were moving out. The fighting was coming closer and they would be moved to the village of Vatsounia, five miles to the northeast over the top of their own mountains. The machine guns would have to be carried; each woman would take a turn. Kanta was among the first group to have one of the heavy guns strapped to her back.

The lack of sleep, the sound of battle, and the suspicion that they were being taken away to fight drained their strength. As Kanta struggled up the peak of the Prophet Elias, she bent low under the weight of the machine gun, the acid taste of fear in her mouth. She fought to keep up with the rest in the darkness, afraid of losing her foothold and falling under the gun.

It was Afrodite Fafoutis, a scrawny seventeen-year-old just ahead of her, who collapsed in a faint before they reached the flat threshing floor on the plateau below the chapel to the Prophet. The girl lay there motionless as the officers began to curse and nudge her with their boots. They discharged a rifle next to her ear to see if she was malingering, but when she didn’t flinch, they angrily unstrapped the rifle from her back and ordered the rest to move on, leaving Afrodite lying where she had fallen. Kanta looked back once or twice until the pale figure faded into the darkness. A firm believer in ghosts, she felt the night was crowded with fleshless, grinning figures of death, waiting to seize her the moment she stepped off the path.