Eleni (41 page)

When they stopped for a five-minute rest to transfer the loads, Kanta heard the sound of a horse approaching. Someone lit a kerosene lantern and out of the darkness emerged a rider. It was Nikola Paroussis, the gaunt, fair-bearded young
andarte
whom her mother had hidden in the storeroom two years before. He dismounted and spoke to the officers, then walked down the line of women. As he came to Kanta he smiled in recognition and said, “How goes it, little one? Have they made an
andartina
out of you?”

The kindness in his voice made her blurt out her fears. “Oh, Nikola, I’m going to die! I can’t carry the gun, I can’t eat out of the common pot. I’m starving to death and I want to go home!”

He gave her a conspiratorial wink and made a “chin up” gesture. Then he vanished into the darkness, leaving Kanta staring after him.

When the villagers of Lia awoke on the morning of December 27, they realized that the battle to the south was coming closer, having moved down from the opposite hills into the foothills below. By midmorning Eleni made another discovery that left her pale and shaken. Glykeria came running into the house shouting,
“Mana!
The
andartinas
are nowhere in the village! They took Kanta away in the night!”

The mothers of the Perivoli gathered in worried knots to whisper, afraid that their daughters had been sent into the battles they could hear raging below. But toward noon, reassuring word reached them: the village girls had been seen marching in the opposite direction, toward the northeast.

It took all night for the group of
andartinas
to get to Vatsounia, where they were barracked in the school, set across a wide square from the small stone houses. Chilled and exhausted, they fell to the floor to sleep for the few hours that remained before reveille woke them at dawn.

After they were transferred to Vatsounia, away from their homes, a subtle transformation came over them. Kanta felt more miserable and lonely than ever, knowing that her mother had no idea where she was, but she noticed that the other girls were changing in puzzling ways. Some tried to outdo the others to impress their instructors with their marksmanship. Instead of gossiping and commiserating together, they divided into cliques, parroting the propaganda slogans of the indoctrination lectures and whispering about girls they suspected of disloyalty to the cause. Even Rano seemed different; harder, somehow, and freer in her conversation with the male guerrillas.

Some of the girls from the village, like Milia Drouboyiannis, who would have blushed if a passing shepherd bade them “Good morning,” now openly flirted with the men. Kanta had never forgotten her mother’s advice to keep as far away as possible from the guerrilla guards at night, and she often sat up in a corner, forcing herself to keep her eyes open until she was certain that the men in the same room were asleep.

One night she watched a pretty, blond girl of about twenty stretch herself out next to a young
andarte
, lying close enough to touch him. Kanta saw the man’s face tense and he turned his back, pretending to be asleep.

The older girls in the group often whispered that the men were given a potion to suppress their sex drive, but Kanta suspected that their celibacy owed more to the fact that any
andarte
accused of tampering with one of the women could be tried, sentenced and executed before a firing squad on the spot. She had seen the dead body of a guerrilla accused of rape paraded on horseback from village to village to dramatize the fate of those who flaunted the DAG’s rule of chastity.

Kanta sat up for many hours that night, watching the girl from her village and the young guerrilla sleeping side by side, and pondered the astonishing things she had seen and learned in the two weeks since she had been taken from her home.

While the unmarried women of Lia were being transformed into guerrillas, the married ones left behind were burdened with increasing duties as war approached the village. Because there were four adult women in the Gatzoyiannis house—Eleni, her mother Megali, her sister Nitsa and Olga—the guerrillas’ representatives came nearly every day to demand one of them for a work detail. But Olga was still disabled by the burn on her foot, Megali wept and insisted that she was too old to go, and then, one day in late December, Nitsa delivered an announcement that she would no longer be able to participate in any heavy work either: she was pregnant.

The statement, delivered with satisfaction at the astonishment it provoked, stunned the family with the impact of a bomb. Everyone smiled uncertainly, convinced that she was joking. But the subject of pregnancy was no joke to Nitsa. She had prayed for a child every day for the past twenty-five years. She had swallowed holy candle wicks and bits of umbilical
cords, stuffed her sleeping pallet with lumpy garlic bulbs, bought countless bits of malewort and bottles of magic water from the local witches. Last October, a month before her husband fled the village with the other men, she had launched her most ambitious charm.

She had made a flexible “candle” a hundred yards long by applying soft wax to a great length of hemp rope, then placed it all the way around the outside of the burned Church of the Virgin. After lighting one end, she solemnly sat cross-legged in the middle of the rubble for an entire day and night until the flame traveled the circumference of the church. It was this spell, Nitsa told her amazed mother and sister, that had finally done the trick. “The Virgin has made me a miracle, she has planted a child in my womb, and I refuse to risk my only chance at happiness by lifting or bending or doing anything that could cause a miscarriage,” she announced with great self-importance.

“God grant that it’s so, sister,” Eleni said, “but you’re forty-four years old! How do you know that you’re not having a change of life?’

“Nonsense!” Nitsa replied, unruffled. “All the signs of pregnancy are there: my monthly bleeding has stopped, my breasts are swollen with milk, my stomach has already grown so that I can’t fasten my skirts, and when a lead weight on a string is held over my belly, it swings straight back and forth. There’s no possibility for doubt. So you see why I can’t risk doing any heavy work.”

Nitsa’s pregnancy became the talk of the Perivoli. All the women agreed that she indeed looked the part, and her belly grew so quickly that they began to talk of twins. She adopted the swaying gait that all proudly pregnant Greek women affect—back arched, stomach thrust forward—walking on her heels with the slow, side-to-side majesty of a rajah’s elephant. The miraculous child would be born in August, she said.

Thus Eleni became the only female in the house still capable of fulfilling the family’s obligations to the work details. Scarcely a day passed when she was not busy from morning to night working for the guerrillas, cooking, gathering firewood, carrying supplies and messages, mending uniforms and building fortifications. And ever since the fighting in the foothills began on Christmas Day, the women of Lia had been assigned a new duty which Eleni found more disturbing than all the others: carrying the wounded.

From the foothills guerrillas came nearly every day carrying comrades bleeding from bullet and shrapnel wounds. The women had to transport the victims in relays to Babouri, where a new team would take over as far as Tsamanta, and still another group of women would carry them to Albania and medical help: After the government forces moved closer and entered Tsamanta on December 30, the westward route to Albania was cut off and the wounded had to be taken in the other direction; northeast toward Vatsounia.

The stretchers were made of canvas suspended between two long poles, and each one required four women. No matter how careful the carriers
were, the wounded man would moan with each jolt. The women’s palms became blistered; muscle cramps traveled across their shoulders and down into their legs.

Going uphill they struggled against the weight and often came to a full stop, swaying on their feet for a few seconds before they could get their legs moving again. On the down slopes their thigh muscles knotted with the effort not to run, to keep the stretcher level and moving slowly. If the man was heavy, the most the women could cover was several hundred yards before they had to stop and rest, breathing in gasps. They moved grimly in lock step, surrounded by the smell of blood and other fluids seeping from the wounded body. If the victim was conscious, he would often thrash and swear, mistaking them for the fascist soldiers. And every wounded man or woman repeated the same piteous refrain: “For god’s sake, water! Water!” The cry kept pace with their steps as they slogged on, a constant torment because no amount of water could ease such thirst. The pain of the body the women carried seemed to pass through the handles of the stretcher and up their arms. Often the cursing and weeping and cries of “Water!” ended abruptly and they knew that the guerrilla’s soul had left his body. Nevertheless, they didn’t stop but staggered on toward their destination, crossing themselves with their free hand and uttering a silent prayer for his soul.

Eleni had done a great deal of praying since Kanta disappeared from Lia on the day after Christmas. She stopped often at the Church of the Holy Trinity in the square to light a candle and ask the saints to protect her daughter and send news of where they had taken her.

One day Eleni and three other women were assigned to take a wounded guerrilla all the way to Vatsounia. There was an empty hole where his left eye had been, and the blood matted his curly black hair into a sticky mass. Eleni sighed as she lifted the back right-hand pole—after ten minutes they would change sides. She knew the journey to Vatsounia and back would take most of the day, so she had tucked a crust of bread, two hard-boiled eggs and a piece of cheese in her pocket for the return trek.

The guerrilla was still alive when they entered Vatsounia, coming over the mountain from the north. Far below, beyond the square, Eleni saw the schoolyard filled with two lines of figures marching in formation. She heard the sound of a shouted “One-two! One-two!” and nearly dropped her corner of the stretcher. As soon as the women delivered their burden to the guerrilla doctor, Eleni hurried down toward the square. First she recognized the tall figure of Rano, then the smaller one of Kanta at the front of the line. She gasped at how thin her daughter had become and felt in her pocket for the food she had brought—at least she could give her that.

The
andartinas
were in the middle of rifle drill when Kanta heard her name called and looked up to see her mother standing on the mountainside, about a thousand feet away. At the vision Kanta bolted from the ranks of the other girls, running toward the figure in the brown dress and black
kerchief. One of the guerrillas stepped in front of her and grabbed her by the shoulders, pushing her back until he shoved her against the wall of the school, knocking her head with a loud thud. “Who do you think you are,
kouchiko?
Someone special?” he shouted. “Get back to the drill!”

Eleni ran toward her daughter, but another guerrilla stopped her descent. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“Only to give this bit of food to my daughter.”

“No one is allowed to speak to the recruits,” he snapped. “They are being well fed. Go back where you came from”.

Eleni could see Kanta pushed against the schoolhouse wall, her head bouncing off the stone. Across the distance, their eyes embraced over the shoulders of the men who held them apart. Eleni wanted to fight the hands that held her, but it would only make trouble for Kanta. She stayed where she was until the girl rejoined the ranks of the marching women. When Eleni couldn’t stand to watch any longer, she turned away.

With the weary tread of a beaten woman, she began to retrace her steps over the spine of the mountain range. When she reached the Chapel of St. Nicholas, high above Lia, Eleni went inside. Watched by the dim eyes of the saints on the ancient frescoed walls, she knelt before the altar and talked aloud to St. Nicholas, asking him to bring her daughter home safely, as he brought sailors back to port out of the storm. She promised him, in exchange for her daughter’s return, a can of oil for the chapel’s lamps. It was a solemn oath and one that she would carry to the grave, for she never had time to honor it.

Even after her death she returned in dreams to those who survived, reminding them of the unpaid debt, but by then the chapel lay in ruins, and there was no way her children could put her soul at peace by fulfilling the vow.

When Kanta saw her mother driven away, without even a word or touch exchanged, she felt her last tenuous hold on hope give way. The loneliness and exhaustion became worse, and her stomach was swollen with malnutrition. Kanta resigned herself to the fact that she was going to die.

For the next few days the temperature dropped close to zero and Kanta ached with the cold; one of her two sweaters had been taken from her by the guerrillas because it wasn’t fair for the Amerikana’s daughter to have two when others had none. One night, as she sat outside the schoolhouse with two other girls, huddled around a fire, trying to get some warmth out of one burning log, Kanta looked across the village square to see smoke rising from the chimney of a small stone house. There was warmth there, and perhaps food. The will to live dies hard at fifteen, and Kanta realized that she wanted to survive and that the only one who could save her was she herself.

She reached for her unloaded rifle and slung it over her shoulder. “Bring
your guns and come with me,” she said to the two other girls. “And don’t say anything. Let me do the talking.”

The two girls, who were both several years older than Kanta, looked at her in surprise, then obeyed. Silently, empty rifles on their shoulders, they crossed the square. Kanta beat on the door of the small house with her rifle butt. A quavering voice from within said, “Who is it?”

“Open the door,” Kanta ordered.

“I can’t,” the voice replied.

Kanta beat louder. “Open the door in the name of the Democratic Army of Greece!” she demanded.

The door opened a few inches and two eyes peered out. “What do you want, my child?” said the shaky voice, sounding surprised at the sight of the small, fierce girl.