Eleni (57 page)

By the time the group reached Vatsounia, it was clear that their destination lay farther on. All around them the fields of hay and wheat had been cut and the stubble burned, leaving ugly, black scars on the red earth. They spent the rest of the night sleeping in the deserted houses of the village, then moved on at dawn, the temperature rising with the sun in the sky until the dust of the road clogged their lungs and their clothes stuck to their backs.

About noon they came to a halt in Granitsopoula, a town of ancient two-story stone buildings around a square shaded with spreading plane trees. Nearby flowed a wide, shallow stream, a tributary of the Kalamas River, which was faintly visible in the foothills below. The Kalamas marked the boundary of the guerrilla-occupied territory.

As they stood marveling at the beauty of the place, the still air carried to them the sound of women chatting on the bank of the stream. They had caught up with the first group of workers taken from Lia. Eleni broke out of the line, calling Glykeria’s name as she ran; a figure in a red dress detached itself from the crowd on the grass. Eleni stared at her daughter. Glykeria’s baby fat had melted away, replace by hollows on her sunburned cheeks and under her eyes. Her face and arms were scratched and bleeding, and her hair and dress were matted with the prickly chaff from the wheat. One side of her jaw was swollen, but she was smiling.

“My poor child, you’ve been suffering!” Eleni exclaimed, reaching for her.

“I’m fine,
Mana
, now that you’re here!” Glykeria cried. “I was afraid I’d lost you.” She caught sight of her aunt Alexo, and ran to hug her, too.

It was the midday break for the harvesters and Eleni sat down with her daughter in the shade out of earshot of the others. She whispered that the family was preparing to escape, and that the two of them would have to flee separately. Glykeria seized her hands in excitement. She was fed up with the backbreaking work of threshing and ready to leave immediately. “I know all the paths around here!” she whispered. “We’ll make it to the Kalamas easily. Let’s go tonight!”

“Tomorrow night,” her mother replied. “First we have to be sure the others are really going. If we leave before them, they’ll be caught and maybe even killed. Olga’s going to send a message with one of the women from Babouri that they’re setting out, and I told them to light a signal fire from the Great Ridge to let us know they reached it.”

That night the women stretched out on the polished wood floors of the empty houses to sleep. Eleni and Alexo put Glykeria between them, all under one blanket, and they spent most of the night whispering. Glykeria told them of her misadventures while she was moving with the harvesters from one abandoned village to another. “Three weeks in this wool dress! I thought I’d die!” she grumbled. “I got my period and had nothing else to wear, so I had to wash my clothes and put them on wet. That gave me a fever and then I got a toothache. I cried for you every day,
Mana
, and the other girls picked on me for being lazy and slow, but now that you’re here, we’ll escape and I’ll never pick up a scythe again!”

After Glykeria fell asleep, Eleni went outside in the darkness and spent the rest of the night staring in the direction of the Great Ridge, waiting for the sign of a fire and repeating a wordless prayer for the deliverance of her children.

At sunup, weak with fatigue and worry, she returned to the room where Glykeria slept. Eleni had a feeling that the children had set out as planned at sunset, but there was no sign that they ever reached the Great Ridge. She tried to avoid the obvious explanation: that they were intercepted on the way.

That morning the women set about threshing under the incandescent disc of the sun, Glykeria and Eleni working side by side. Each time they came to the end of a row, mother and daughter would straighten up, rubbing their backs, and gaze at the Kalamas, beckoning them from the distance with the promise of freedom.

Eleni kept scanning the top of the hill, waiting for the group to arrive from Babouri, one of them carrying a message from Olga. Just before noon, twenty women entered the village, and Eleni anxiously searched the faces of the new arrivals. Finally one of them, Mitsena Migdales, walked up to her and said, “Olga came up to me yesterday morning as we passed through Lia, and told me to tell you that she was going to cut the wheat.”

The woman was startled when Eleni seized her hands gratefully, then ran off to speak to Glykeria. They took up their scythes with new energy. The waiting was over; the family had gone. They could leave that night to cross
the Kalamas and, God willing, find the children on the other side. Eleni tried to stay calm by imagining the family together again and free.

She had only a few hours to savor her dream. The harvesters were sitting in the shade of a grove of trees, devouring the noon meal of cheese and bread, when two guerrillas arrived on horseback from the nearby threshing ground. Eleni was astonished to see Rano Athanassiou, Olga’s best friend, riding behind one of them. Rano had been sent to the harvest in the first group, along with Glykeria, but Eleni looked in vain for her among the women cutting wheat. Glykeria said enviously that Rano had been chosen to supervise the women at the threshing floor, a much easier job. Now the Gatzoyiannis women stared as Rano neared them.

The two guerrillas dismounted, and one of them called for the group’s attention. “Half of you are needed to go to Vistrovo, where there are more fields to harvest,” he shouted. “The rest will stay here until we’re finished.”

Eleni watched in an agony of suspense as the guerrilla went about arbitrarily choosing the women who would go to Vistrovo. When he came up to her and Glykeria, his eyes rested on them for a moment too long, then he said, “The girl goes.”

“Please, Comrade!” Eleni begged, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “Let my daughter stay here. I haven’t seen her for three weeks. Let me have just one more night with her.”

“No, she’s going,” he replied sharply and moved on. Eleni noticed that Rano was watching them. Eleni got up and went over to the young woman, who had always been like one of her family. It was Rano who had come to warn them when she overheard the guerrillas planning to search their house, and she had hidden with Olga and Kanta when they began conscripting women.

“Please, Rano!” Eleni begged. “They’ll listen to you! Tell him how important it is for me to have a little more time with Glykeria. The girl’s sick; she’s just a baby! She’s been working all these weeks. You could take her place in Vistrovo. Do it for me!”

Rano said she’d do what she could. Eleni watched as the young woman went over to the guerrilla and whispered in his ear. He turned to look toward Eleni and Glykeria, who stared back imploringly. But when they ordered the women for Vistrovo to line up, Rano didn’t move. The guerrilla walked over to Glykeria. “I told you, you’re going with them,” he snapped. Eleni could see Rano lift her shoulders in a shrug of helplessness.

Mother and daughter looked at each other in despair, their hope of freedom slipping from them. They barely had time for a last kiss before the guerrilla pulled Glykeria away and the group set out toward Vistrovo. Rano stood nearby, watching impassively.

All that afternoon Eleni worked mechanically. As the sun began to set and the women filed back from the fields, Alexo ran to catch up with her. “You have a clear night for it,” she whispered. “As soon as everyone’s asleep, you can slip down into the foothills.”

Eleni turned and looked at her. “I can’t go now!” she said, as if explaining to a child. “Think what they’d do to Glykeria if I escaped. I can’t go to the others and leave this one to die!”

Alexo argued with her in whispers, but she refused to answer. That night Eleni passed her untouched dinner ration to her sister-in-law and then went outside to sit on the steps of the house, facing south toward the shadow of the Great Ridge. One of the guerrillas guarding the women noticed her all-night vigil. It seemed to him that she was watching for something.

With Eleni gone, the Gatzoyiannis children scurried about like a flock of chicks without the hen, trying to prepare for the escape. Following their mother’s directions, Olga and Kanta set out early in the day to make a show of cutting the wheat in the family’s field, but they did more whispering than harvesting, and returned home early so that Olga could compose the letter she was supposed to leave behind. As neighbor women passed them on the path, the girls imagined suspicious looks and sinister undertones in every greeting. All day long they vacillated between fear that the escape would be canceled and hope that it would. Then Olga wrote with a pencil stub in her childish scrawl:

She studied the letter, weighing each word to see if it rang false. Then she hid the paper in the wall niche beside the fireplace, and worried aloud that the guerrillas wouldn’t find it.

Eleni had explained the new procedure to them. In order for the whole family to assemble at Lukas Ziaras’ house without arousing suspicion, they would go at different times. Well before the sun set, Kanta would take Nikola and Fotini with her and lead the two milk goats to graze in the fields of their uncle Foto at the bottom of the village. After sundown they would abandon the goats and slip into the Ziaras house nearby, while Megali and Nitsa would start out from the Haidis house. Olga would come last because she had to wait until the family’s flock of sheep had been brought back from the pasture by the half-witted shepherdess, Vasilo Barka, who had been paid to take them for the day. Once the animals were securely locked in the cellar, Olga had to hurry to the Ziaras house and the exodus would begin.

Distraught by the responsibility that rested on her shoulders, Olga hovered in the window, watching the sun, until she decided it was time to send off Kanta, Nikola and Fotini. Suddenly Fotini plunged the household into a crisis. The ten-year-old couldn’t find the precious sack that held her collection of hair bows, charms, tin rings, and baubles handed out by the
guerrillas’ commissary head. When life seemed unjust to Fotini, as it did nearly every day, she displayed the histrionic range of a tragedienne. “That child started crying with her first breath and hasn’t stopped since,” Eleni often complained, clapping her hands over her ears. Now Fotini was screaming that without her treasures she wouldn’t set foot out the door. She was interrupted by a sharp knock that stunned everyone into silence.

Olga hesitated, but the knocking became more insistent. She peeked out and saw Kostina Thanassis, their plump, grandmotherly neighbor from the Perivoli, whose home was a warehouse for guerrilla supplies.

Kostina chirped that she had brought some marmalade as a treat for her favorite little boy. Nikola obediently let the old woman kiss and cuddle him while the rest watched tensely. “Poor child, with your mother off at the harvesting,” she crooned. “You must come up to Grandma Kostina’s house tomorrow. I’ll see if I can’t find you a chocolate somewhere.” The girls sucked in their breath, afraid Nikola would reply that tomorrow was too late, but he only nodded and stared at the floor.

It was past the hour for Kanta and the youngest children to leave, but Kostina rattled on about the terrible things happening in their old neighborhood. While the girls gave each other desperate looks, Megali crept behind her and sprinkled a few precious grains of salt—the charm to make unwanted company leave. Finally Kostina stood up. As Olga held the door open, the old woman suddenly embraced Nikola and whispered, “My golden boy, may God protect you!” Then she was gone, leaving the rest to wonder how much she knew.

The departure of Kostina Thanassis plunged the Gatzoyiannis family into frantic activity. Kanta ran to the cellar and tied the two milk goats on ropes, then went back for Fotini and Nikola. Fotini had renewed her wails over the lost sack of keepsakes, and Nikola stood inside the doorway, frowning with worry, holding his school bag—the brown-and-tan leather satchel that his father had sent from America. In it was a rusty Byzantine sword blade that the boy had unearthed at the spring outside his grandmother’s gate, along with the carefully ruled notebooks he had used in his two years at the village school. “What are you doing with that?” Kanta demanded.

“If I don’t show them my lessons, they may make me take first and second grades over again when we get to America,” Nikola explained.

“Nonsense!” Olga shrieked, her voice rising. “You can’t take that with you! They have better notebooks and school bags where we’re going.” She snatched the valise out of his hand and threw it behind the door, then shoved him out into the path, where Kanta handed him the lead of one of the goats.

As Kanta dragged the two children down the path, Fotini uttered a shuddering sob and Nikola turned around for a last glimpse of the house. Although Olga, Nitsa and Megali were still inside, the place seemed sad and deserted to him in the vivid late-afternoon light, and he felt a pang of
sympathy for the house and animals, abandoned so suddenly. They had left everything behind: his sword blade, two years of schoolwork. Even his mother’s good brown dress still hung on a hanger in the good chamber, like an echo of her presence.

When the sun was balancing on the crest of the Great Ridge, Olga ordered Megali and Nitsa to set out, heading for the Ziaras house by a roundabout route, taking care not to arouse anyone’s suspicions. She could see that was a wasted warning; Megali was already sobbing and Nitsa’s last dramatic cry before she waddled out the door was, “This is the night I’m going to die! I can feel it!”

Olga stared out the southern window at the setting sun, watching small pink-tinted clouds chasing one another across the sky. When twilight fell, Kanta would enter the Ziaras door with Nikola and Fotini, but Olga had to wait until Crazy Vasilo brought back the family’s flock, and she was afraid that the others would get impatient and leave without her. She couldn’t start before the animals came, because Vasilo would find the house empty and raise the alarm.