Eleni (43 page)

“If, if!” Stalin interrupted. “No, they have no prospect of success at all. What do you think, that Great Britain and the United States—the United States, the most powerful nation in the world—will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean Sea? Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.”

But the writing on the wall was illegible to the obstinate leader of the Greek Communist Party, Nikos Zachariadis. He remained convinced that a string of victories by the guerrillas would persuade Stalin to lend his full support to the uprising.

To make up for the shrinking number of recruits joining the DAG, its leaders sent two brigades through Macedonia to seize as many young women and men as they could find. Both brigades met stiff opposition from government forces, and they not only failed to bring back many recruits but lost half of their 3,000 veteran fighters in skirmishes along the way.

Party leaders then decided to send another group of guerrillas south toward Athens to open a route to the capital over which urban Communists could march to join them in the mountains. A hand-picked band of 200 men was sent off on this impossible mission, and not one of them returned.

As the DAG’s hope of finding recruits faded, so did its expectations of capturing major towns and cities. Zachariadis was forced to modify his strategy, but he refused to return to the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics favored by General Markos. The insurgents would not launch any more massive attacks on population centers, but they would hold on at all costs to the mountain strongholds they controlled, Zachariadis insisted, until the Greek National Army realized it could never defeat them, became totally demoralized and collapsed.

To make sure that everyone—guerrillas and civilians in the “liberated” areas—remained loyal until that happened, the DAG’s political commissars were reorganized and given authority to enforce discipline among all military units and cooperation from all civilians living in the occupied villages.

Meanwhile the National Army, assisted by American advisers under General James Van Fleet, began preparing a large-scale operation for the summer of 1948 to destroy the guerrilla army by capturing their main base in the Grammos mountain range. But such an offensive would expose the attacking army’s western flank to assaults by the guerrillas in the Mourgana range. Before Grammos could be taken, it was necessary to clear out the guerrillas in the Mourgana mountains, whose center was the village of Lia.

D
URING JANUARY AND FEBRUARY OF
1948, the muffled thunder of distant artillery became as much a part of life in Lia as the tintinnabulation of the goats’ bells and the morning oratorio of the roosters. The constant rumble, like subterranean growls before an earthquake, grew in volume every night as hit-and-run patrols of guerrillas from the Mourgana crept across the valley below and up the distant hills of no man’s land to harass the government troops.

After the defeat at Konitsa, the guerrillas in the Mourgana knew that a reciprocal attack was certain to come, so in the first months of 1948 they feverishly built fortifications to secure their positions in the “guerrilla fortress,” as they called the Mourgana in their songs. In the mountains above and in Lia itself they built defense works everywhere, using teams of village women to carry the rocks and beams, mix the cement and dig ditches to serve as mortar pits and machine-gun nests.

Sinister pillboxes with one narrow slit facing south sprang up like scarecrows throughout the village at every spot with a view of the foothills. There were half a dozen in the Perivoli alone, where the guerrilla’s base of operations was concentrated, and over 2,500 fortifications in the entire Mourgana range. It was clear to the Liotes that the guerrillas expected their fortress to be besieged.

Another harbinger of war entered the rhythm of village life. Every day about noon, a formation of four sleek Spitfires would appear in the distance from the east and split apart, one pair sweeping the Mourgana peaks north of Lia, bombing guerrilla artillery nests among the crags, and the other strafing the line of guerrilla positions in the foothills to the south, following the spine of the Great Ridge that loomed against the southern horizon.

The bellwether of the bombers was a single Harvard reconnaissance plane that passed directly over the village at dawn every morning, flown by a daring pilot who quickly became legendary among the village boys because of his skill. The guerrillas had christened the man “Galatas,” which means
“milkman,” because of his regular early-morning rounds, but the villagers, knowing nothing of milkmen and their behavior, assumed that the pilot’s name really was Galatas.

The milkman’s job was to survey the mountain terrain below, pinpointing guerrilla fortifications and congregations which the bombers would attack later in the day. Preceded by the drone of his engine, Galatas would burst through the cleft between the peaks of the Prophet Elias and Kastro, flying only two hundred feet above ground, his camouflaged blue-bellied, single-engine craft skimming the rooftops, dodging anti-aircraft fire from the peaks, waggling his wings in mockery or greeting, so close that the children could see his face in its plastic bubble. They waved and shouted “Galatas!,” watching with more admiration than fear until he was out of sight, swooping heavenward like an eagle.

As soon as Galatas began his dawn flights, Colonel Petritis called Eleni into his office and issued an order. Every morning, when the engine of the surveillance plane was heard, the guards outside the Gatzoyiannis gate would be withdrawn and she was to send the three youngest children—Nikola, Fotini and Glykeria—out into the yard to play. There was no danger, Petritis assured her; Galatas didn’t carry bombs, only cameras, and if he saw women about and children playing in the yard, the fascists would avoid bombing the house. But if they suspected it was a guerrilla headquarters, it could become a target.

To the children it seemed a fine game. They waved enthusiastically at Galatas as soon as his plane burst between the mountain peaks, still shrouded in mist. But Eleni stood on the threshold and watched the great bird pass over, thinking dark thoughts of falling fire and death.

With the portent of impending battle hanging in the air, the children of Lia became obsessed with war games, happily mimicking the killing around them. In the neighborhood of the Perivoli the organizer of the battles was the son of the miller Tassi Mitros—a swarthy, powerfully built twelve-year-old named Niko who had physical daring and a gift for imaginative profanity that made the smaller boys worship him. Inevitably he was the one who would announce a mock battle and divide the rest of the neighborhood boys into two teams: the guerrillas and the fascists, with himself, naturally, the commander of the guerrillas.

Nikola Gatzoyiannis was in awe of the older boy and always hoped that Niko Mitros would choose him for the guerrilla side. But like his friend Lakis Bartzokis, Tassina’s son, who was also only eight years old, and small at that, he always got assigned to the fascist team. Whether this was because he and Lakis were younger and weaker than the rest, or because their families were considered sympathetic to the nationalist side, Nikola wasn’t sure, but he suspected it was a little of both.

Ever since a blizzard had left ample snow on the ground for ammunition, the battles had taken on a set ritual. The two teams would dig in on either side of a low stone wall and pile up a supply of icy missiles. The “fascists,”
as in real life, were always given the more vulnerable downhill position.

First came an exchange of curses imitating the taunts shouted across the foothills every night through bullhorns. “Cuckolds! Cuntlappers!” Niko Mitros and his gang would bellow through rolled notebooks, and the “fascists” would shout back, “Gruel eaters! Masturbators! Dungkickers!” Eventually a sniper would poke his head over the wall, to be greeted with a barrage of snowballs. If he was hit, he was dead. When one team had whittled down the enemy to their satisfaction, they would launch a siege, storming over the wall in a hail of snowballs to annihilate the survivors.

Niko Mitros usually led the attack on the hapless “fascists” while Nikola and Lakis forgot all about defensive fire and curled into balls, covering their faces with their arms. The game would end with bruises, cuts and black eyes for the “fascists,” and with Lakis running home to his mother in tears. Nikola, pale and silent, refused to sympathize with his comrade at arms or even admit that Niko Mitros was singling them out for punishment. “Lakis asks for it,” Nikola reasoned, “because he’s a crybaby.” He longed to be on the opposite team, the winning team, and see admiration instead of scorn in Niko Mitros’ eyes.

Being the only male in a household of women, with no adult except his stern, tyrannical grandfather as a model, Nikola had learned to hide his feelings behind a protective shell of silence, and to keep his problems and fears to himself. He had absorbed the village conviction that a man must be strong, decisive and taciturn, while women were fragile reeds, bending with every breeze, victims of their emotions.

Nikola also realized at an early age that he would have to compensate for lack of brawn with shrewdness, and he vowed to become as wily as his grandfather. Now he set his mind to the problem of winning Niko Mitros’ admiration.

Nikola knew that he had a double handicap: his size and the fact that his father lived in America. Secretly Nikola admired the father he had never seen, whose image sat in majesty atop the mantelpiece, and often he would search his own thin features in the small hand mirror for a resemblance to his father’s rotund grandeur. Lately, however, he had begun to look at the photograph of Christos with reproach. If his father had only gone to Russia instead of America, he thought, then perhaps Niko Mitros would let him fight on the guerrilla side. But he couldn’t repudiate his father or change the fact that his grandfather was a “fascist.” He would have to win over Niko Mitros in spite of these disadvantages.

Nikola’s part in the war games came to an abrupt end one day when a wayward bomb nearly hit a field above the Perivoli, where the mock guerrillas and fascists were battling. Grimly Eleni ordered Nikola not to play outside the family’s yard, where she could keep an eye on him. That was the beginning of long, solitary hours spent pacing the boundaries of his prison as the snow melted, dreaming of unlikely exploits that would earn him a reputation as a fearless warrior. One day when he could almost feel
the earth beneath his feet heaving with the approach of spring, he found a gray little thrush with one broken wing. He caught it, feeling the small heart beating against his palm like a pulse, and laughed at the way the bird opened its tiny beak to peck him, its whole body trembling with the effort. He designed a cage out of a discarded ammunition box and fed it with crumbs from his finger. The bird grew to trust him, and even after the wing healed and he released it, it would fly to him, studying him with one alert eye and then the other, waiting to be fed. Having always been the baby of the family, Nikola enjoyed nursing something weaker than himself, but he didn’t mention the bird to the other children.

In previous years, the advent of spring had been heralded by the arrival of terrifying, scarecrowlike men called
kalogheroi
—in reality, village bachelors who dressed themselves in grotesque costumes made from the hide of a goat, pointed hoods over their heads with skull-like holes cut out for eyes, and strings of goats’ bells across their chests. The
kalogheroi
would caper about the village frightening the children, pulling obscene stunts and enacting an ancient farce involving murder and a miraculous resurrection. The custom was rooted in the magical Dionysian rites of the ancients, intended to help the forces of nature fertilize the land, but with the coming of the guerrillas, such superstitions had been banned along with church ceremonies. In the children’s imagination the guerrillas themselves took the place of the
kalogheroi:
sinister figures evoking fear and fascination.

One day in late February, Nikola accompanied his mother on a visit to Tassina Bartzokis’ house across the path, where he witnessed a confrontation between two guerrillas that made a deep impression on him. Lakis was there too, but Nikola ignored him, not wanting to be seen associating with crybabies.

There was a guerrilla captain named Harisis Stravos billeted in the Bartzokis house, a man notorious throughout the Mourgana because, in front of his village church, he had once knifed a young woman to death because she refused to marry him. When the Germans occupied Greece, Stravos was released from prison and joined the ELAS. His penchant for stabbing those he captured became well known and his refusal to bring any back alive ultimately led to his demotion within the DAG.

While Tassina and Eleni sat gossiping in the Bartzokis kitchen, Nikola wandered out into the garden, where he found the infamous Stravos and another guerrilla captain engaged in target practice, shooting at a knot in a walnut tree fifty paces away. The dark, muscular Stravos reminded Nikola of Niko Mitros. His opponent was blond, thin and soft-spoken, but his first two shots hit the knot dead center, while Stravos fired twice and missed. “It’s not a fair match!” Stravos complained. “You’ve got the better gun.” His face was flushed.