Eleni (49 page)

When they arrived at the house of Angeliki’s aunt at the very top of the Perivoli, the comforting scent of baking bread and the warm welcome of Soula Botsaris lifted her uneasiness a little. Soula invited Angeliki and Eleni inside, and when she heard of Eleni’s plight, disappeared, returning with a small cloth bag of salt. “Don’t talk about paying me!” she whispered. “Neighbors have to help each other in difficult times. Just don’t tell anyone where you got this.”

Suddenly a groan from the other room made the hairs on Eleni’s arms rise. At first she thought it was a sick animal, but then the sound formed itself into a word: “Water!”

Soula put her finger to her lips and motioned for them to peek through the keyhole into the other room. Eleni bent down to look and caught her breath. A man wearing the remains of a uniform lay on the floor inside, stretched out on a large wooden plank. His legs and arms were tied to the board with wire. He moved restlessly and Eleni saw that the wire had worked its way a half inch into the flesh of his ankles. His face was turned away but she could hear the nearly unintelligible moan: “Water! Please, water!”

She turned to look at Soula and the woman whispered, “It’s one of the prisoners. They had too many to fit them all in your cellar.”

“For God’s sake, can’t you give him a little water?” Eleni demanded.

“Don’t be stupid, child!” said the older woman in a suddenly cold voice. “If they caught me, I’d end up the same way he is.”

That night as the family crowded around to taste the fresh bread Eleni had baked with the salt, she watched them eat for a moment; then, in a voice that made them stop and look at her, she ordered the children never to climb the path to the Perivoli again. In answer to their questions she said only, “Terrible things are happening up there. Everything’s changed.”

•  •  •

Most of the children accepted Eleni’s ultimatum without complaint. As respectable young women, Olga and Kanta were confined to the house anyway. Nikola and Fotini had become used to being allowed to play only within the boundaries of the Haidis land. Nikola had made the bean field below the house his private retreat and would often lie on his back there and watch the clouds scudding across the March sky. Because none of his friends came to visit, he had a lot of time to think.

But to fourteen-year-old Glykeria, who was incorrigibly curious, Eleni’s warning was a challenge. One sunny afternoon when the rest were taking the siesta, she crept up the back gardens behind their old house to see what her mother meant. Climbing from one terraced field to another, she went as far as the retaining wall that bounded the lower edge of their property, and peered over, peeking at the side farthest from the path.

The air was sweet with the scent of the almond trees, and the breeze carried to her ears the rhythmic crunch of someone digging. As she poked her head higher over the wall, Glykeria saw a uniformed guerrilla standing in a deep hole shoveling dirt. On the far side of the hole stood two men, their hands behind them. In a flash the girl understood the tableau in front of her. The bound prisoners were going to be executed and the guerrilla was digging their grave before their eyes. She looked around and realized why the back garden seemed so different; it was studded with rectangles of newly turned soil—all graves.

Glykeria made a stifled sound; the guerrilla stopped digging and reached for the gun that lay on the ground. But she was already running as fast as her legs could carry her toward the Haidis house. When she got inside, she guiltily picked up a broom and began sweeping the front steps, but her face and her unwonted industry gave her away. Eleni studied her, then said, “All right, troublemaker! What have you been up to now?”

At first the girl protested weakly, then the whole story came out in a rush. Eleni pressed her lips together until there was a white rim around them, a habit she had when she was upset.

“I was lonesome for our house, so I went to visit it,” said Glykeria, near tears. “But they’re killing and burying people in our yard,
Mana!
I’ll never go back there again!”

Eleni felt violated. The irony of it made her nauseated. She had forfeited her family’s chances to leave the village ahead of the guerrillas in order to stay and protect that house, and now it had been turned into a prison, a killing ground. With the desecration of her home, she felt her last emotional tie to the village dissolve.

By the time spring set the Judas trees ablaze, executions were as much a part of village life as propaganda meetings had once been. The villagers plowed their fields and tended their crops and looked the other way. After
all, only captured soldiers and strangers were being killed. In a civil war it was wisest not to inquire into such affairs, nor to tamper with the workings of the people’s justice.

Only the children paid close attention to the executions, considering it a new form of entertainment. Nikola was not allowed to leave the yard, so he didn’t understand where the bound, beaten prisoners that often passed by on the path were going, but other, less well supervised children quickly learned where they could hide to get a good view of the proceedings.

Only trials of important persons and those with propaganda value were held in the public square. Most executions were carried out in a much more summary way, with no witnesses other than the guerrillas involved and the children peeking from their hiding places. Many of the soldiers captured during the Pergamos campaign were executed in the cemetery behind the razed Church of the Virgin, at the southernmost boundary of the village, just before the mountain made a sharp drop toward the foothills below.

The children who lived in the few houses around the church would find vantage points high enough on the hillside so that the guerrillas couldn’t drive them off by throwing stones. There they would cheer, hiss and boo like spectators at a football match as the condemned soldiers were forced to dig their own graves, then stand next to them to be shot. George Ziaras, the seven-year-old son of the tinker Lukas Ziaras, watched nearly every day with his six-year-old sister Olympia. George recalls that most of the prisoners died calling for their mother, but one imaginative soldier used his last second to scream: “Uncle Leonidas!” In the stunned silence that followed, as the guerrillas looked at one another in surprise, the prisoner catapulted himself over the precipice in front of him and rolled out of sight to safety down the mountain. Of all the executions George Ziaras watched, that was his favorite.

Although Eleni tried to shield her children from knowledge of the killings going on around them, she didn’t succeed. One day Kanta was sent out to graze the goats along with her friend Olympia Barkas and her family’s flock. They took the path toward Babouri and let the animals wander down a ravine halfway between the two villages. Chattering away, the two girls walked with their eyes on the ground looking for the wild violet-blue tassel hyacinth and its white bulbous root, which they called “turtledove’s bread” because in the spring the birds pecked the tubers out of the ground. The villagers could wring nourishment out of dozens of wild plants: every part of the dandelion could be eaten; acorns and even pine cones were considered a delicacy. The white root called “turtledove’s bread” was one of Kanta’s favorite treats, and she was hungry.

Walking with her eyes on the ground, the girl noticed a loose pile of rocks and stopped, paralyzed by what she saw. A human hand and arm projected from it. Kanta leaned down and frantically pulled up one flat rock and then another.

The woman in the red-bordered tunic was rigid in death, her arms spread open as if to embrace the sky, her eyes wide, her lips drawn back into a
grimace of terror. Kanta felt the thin saliva in her mouth that meant she was going to vomit. She turned to scream for Olympia, who was following the goats. Then she saw another body; a young girl lying with her head on one shoulder as if asleep, the aureole of her wavy hair glinting copper in the sunlight, her skin still pale-pink. She looked like a sleeping child, and Kanta involuntarily reached out and touched her cheek, then jerked her hand back. The body was warm. She found her voice. “Olympia! Olympia!” she screamed. By the time her friend was close enough to see the two bodies she was screaming too, but Kanta had regained her senses. She crouched over the body of the girl. “Hush!” she hissed at Olympia. “That one’s dead but this one is still alive! We’ve got to get help!”

A rustling in the bushes nearby made them both spin around with a shriek. Slowly two guerrillas who had been hiding there rose, their rifles pointed at Kanta and Olympia. Without a word they motioned with the gun barrels, signaling them to move on.

Kanta stood up, still feeling the warmth of the girl’s cheek on her fingertips. She looked at Olympia, then both girls bolted toward home as if pursued, forgetting all about the animals grazing below. As soon as they were out of sight, they heard a shot.

When Kanta burst into the house and described what she had just seen, Eleni sat down on the floor and covered her face with her hands. The image flashed into her mind of the mother and daughter she had glimpsed in the yard of the police station talking to the guerrillas. She thought they were only inquiring about a prisoner, but they must have been prisoners themselves, and what she saw in the courtyard must have been their trial. Eleni remembered the way the girl had held her mother’s hand so trustingly. Rage filled her, and a sick helplessness. She never thought it would go this far. She had believed what Christos wrote her, that the guerrillas were fellow Greeks fighting for their rights who would not harm her family. To appease them and protect her children she had given up her house, her belongings and food, she had sent her daughter to be an
andartina
and gone every day on the assigned work details, all the time being careful not to say anything that could be construed as criticism of the DAG. She had believed that submission, no matter how bitter, would protect her family from harm. But now they were killing women and children! No one in the village was safe.

The memory of the woman in the tunic and her red-headed daughter reproached her. “Let’s go back and find them,” Eleni said to Kanta, standing up. “Perhaps they’re still alive. We can’t just leave them there!”

Kanta’s eyes were hard, unsettling in a child’s face. “Even if they were alive then, they’re dead now,” she said with heartbreaking logic. “There’s nothing we can do. I just wish I hadn’t touched her.”

Ever since Pergamos, the guerrillas had been expecting another attack, and on March 30 it came. This time the nationalist troops called it Operation Falcon and again planned a pincer movement centering on Lia. As soon as
the sound and smoke of the battle moved into the valley below her, Eleni allowed herself to hope; this time the family were all together in the Haidis house, and if the soldiers came anywhere near the village boundaries, they were ready to flee. But the guerrillas had planted their mine fields and fortifications well, and the attacking soldiers never advanced any farther than the foothills below the Mourgana. The battle lasted for seven days; the nationalist soldiers suffering three times as many casualties as the guerrillas. As they inched forward toward Lia, 267 soldiers were wounded or killed, and on April 5, Operation Falcon was abandoned in defeat.

Although the fighting never reached the village, one inhabitant of Lia died as a result of Operation Falcon. The victim was Tsavena, the aged mother of Eleni’s former neighbor Marina Kolliou.

As the nationalist artillery battered the Perivoli from the Great Ridge in the distance, Tsavena, who was ill, fell into an exhausted sleep in the small room off her daughter’s kitchen while Marina and Tsavena’s granddaughter, Olga Venetis, tried to calm Olga’s two little boys. After dark the women were startled by the sound of guerrillas pounding on their door. The
andartes
announced that they needed the house for the night to billet some of the reinforcements expected to arrive from Macedonia. Everyone had to clear out immediately.

“What am I supposed to do with my mother?” asked Marina Kolliou. “Make her sleep on the ground? She’s ninety years old and has a bad heart.”

“We don’t care what you do. Take her by the leg and throw her into the ravine!” the guerrilla replied. “Just get her out of here.”

Marina wanted to carry the old woman on her back down to a neighbor’s house, but Olga insisted it would kill her grandmother if she was taken out into the hail of mortar shells and the cold night air. She suggested that they just lock the small room where Tsavena was sleeping and leave her there until morning, when they would come back for her. The guerrillas would never know she was there.

It might have worked, but when the guerrilla reinforcements arrived from Macedonia long after midnight, exhausted and impatient for rest, they began pounding on the windows as well as the door. The old woman woke up to see satanic, dirt-streaked, bearded faces peering through the glass, shouting and cursing, trying to break in. She screamed for her daughter but no one answered her cries. When Marina and Olga found her in the morning, Tsavena was lying on the floor paralyzed. She died before the day was over, while the guerrillas celebrated their victorious defeat of the fascists around her body.

With a heavy heart, Eleni climbed up to the Perivoli to attend her neighbor’s funeral as the bull horns caroled the great victory. When the battle began Eleni had allowed herself to hope that the government soldiers might reach high enough for the family to flee. Now she was convinced there would never be another chance. The guerrillas seemed entrenched forever, too well fortified for the walls of their citadel to be breached.

Eleni listened to the funeral dirges lamenting Tsavena’s death. It wasn’t two months ago that Fotini had come to her in a dream and told her to get ready; she was taking Tsavena first, then returning for her. Now Tsavena had set out on the journey to Charon, and Eleni couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that her own destiny was beginning to unwind, fulfilling her mother-in-law’s words.

Suspicion and fear infected every home in the village, making next-door neighbors and even relatives wary of what they said to one another. Eleni was not immune to the general paranoia, and when she received an unexpected visit one morning in April from Spiro Michopoulos, fear made her hands tremble and her voice sound hollow as she greeted him.