Eleni (6 page)

When Eleni led her children to the burial ground behind the Church of St. Demetrios, in the shade of the giant cypress trees, the professional mourners were already there, clucking sociably like a flock of crows. Soon they would be ripping the bosoms of their dresses, throwing dirt on their heads and weaving the story-songs of Fotini’s life into dirges that could raise the hair on a heathen’s scalp.

Father Zisis, in his black robes and flat-topped hat, joined the mourners, making the sign of the cross. Eleni picked up a shovel, for it was the duty of the closest relatives to dig up the corpse. Her brother-in-law Foto Gatzoyiannis did the same. He was the only one of Fotini’s children who was not dead or too far away to return.

Eleni handed the baby boy, Nikola, to her eldest daughter, Olga, twelve, who balanced him on one hip, clearly bored with the ceremony. Alexandra, eight, called by the village nickname “Kanta,” had refused to come at all. Kanta was a nervous, superstitious child who hid in the outhouse, hands pressed over her ears, at the first death knell of the church bells. The sight of a corpse would leave her screaming in her sleep for weeks.

Fat, flaxen-haired Glykeria, six, was the opposite, pushing to the front, eager for the first glimpse of her grandmother’s skeleton. Whether it was
a wedding, a funeral, a traveling shadow-puppet show or the mating of the family ram to a neighbor’s ewe, Glykeria, with her impish eyes and angel hair, was always in the front row. In her excitement, Glykeria had forgotten to look after her little sister, Fotini, two, who now sat deserted on a grave nearby where she was screwing up her face for a wail of misery.

The survivors began to dig and the mourners lifted their keening voices, inspiring one another to ever greater displays of poetry and grief:

Eleni took her turn at the shovel and soon the black shroud wrapped around Fotini’s body became visible. They cleared away the last of the dirt with their hands.

The mourners held their breath. Sometimes the corpse would not be fully decomposed, which meant that the soul was not at peace, but rather a wandering vampire, a
vrykolakas
. This would require an exorcism by the priest while the remains were carried three times around the church and then reburied for another few years.

But all was well with Fotini. There was a pungent, mossy odor of decay as the black shroud was lifted off. As so often happened, the collapsed features lay exposed, complete as in life, for one last instant before they crumbled into dust. The priest’s voice rose in the
trisagion
—the thrice-holy hymn: “Holy God, Holy Almighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” The skeleton lay face up, its arms crossed over the icon, the gold cross lying on the breastbone, the coins to pay the journey to Hades long ago fallen into the eye sockets. Then the women lifted the bones into a copper ewer, where they were washed and sprinkled with red wine, in preparation for reinterment in the small wooden box less than two feet square with crude lettering on the side: “Fotini Nik. Gatzoyiannis, 1851–1935.”

After the bones were washed clean of dirt and bits of clinging flesh, then piled into the box, the skull was turned upside down like a chalice and red wine poured into the cranium. This cup was passed from hand to hand so that whoever wished could drink from it to erase any curse that Fotini might have spoken against him in life.

Foto, fiercely mustached and bold as always, held his mother’s skull for a moment, then drank deeply. He had been her sorrow, jailed for murder, a poor provider for his ten children, a notorious adventurer and braggart, and he had good reason to drink, for fear that she might have died with some uncanceled curse against him. Alexo, Foto’s tall, open-faced second
wife, dutifully took a swallow after him. The skull passed farther around the circle, and the wails of the mourners rose in pitch.

Eleni scarcely heard them. She was thinking of the round, smile-creased face of her mother-in-law, an illiterate, wide-hipped village woman who never complained despite the gall life had served her: four of her nine children dead before adulthood, plundering and burnings by the Turks, nagging hunger and deaths that came swiftly as a summer storm. The evil eye had carried away her beautiful daughter Vasiliki when she was sixteen. Her fourth son, Constantine, was a deaf-mute. Her tinker husband Nikola was felled by an attack of pneumonia and left her a widow, pregnant with a little girl who died before they could baptize her.

But Fotini had managed to rear five sons who helped support the family after her husband’s death. Her favorite, Christos, walked out of the village at seventeen, wearing the fez of the Turkish occupiers, to find the golden land of America. He returned fourteen years later, a bald, prosperous foreigner in a straw hat and pin-striped suit, so changed that Fotini didn’t recognize him until she bent down his head and found the scar from the time he fell out of the walnut tree.

The arrival of such a bachelor—thirty-one years old, magnificently dressed, the owner of a flourishing business in America—set the local matchmakers atwitter. Christos’ family pressed him to choose a wife from among the village girls before he returned to the other side. The one most often recommended by his relatives was Eleni Haidis, seventeen, the second daughter of Lia’s most prosperous miller. She was described as being of irreproachable character, with the cleverness of her wily father but the gentle nature of her mother. And she was so beautiful, Christos’ elder brother Foto told him, that as she walked down to her father’s mill, the villagers, looking at her, whispered, “God give me two more eyes!”

Christos took the path to church that passed by the miller’s property, and there he saw Eleni working in the garden. He recalls how the sun seemed to shine from her golden brown hair and poppy-red cheeks, but he insists that it was the modesty of her demeanor and her downcast eyes that attracted him.

Kitso Haidis was not one to confide in his daughter, but when Foto Gatzoyiannis came to call, the girl suspected what was in the air. She had seen Christos Gatzoyiannis going to church in his fine foreign clothes. He was not handsome and he was fourteen years older than she, but unlike her tyrannical father, whose house she could leave only as a bride, this man with the soft white hands and fine manners was rumored to be kind and generous.

Naturally, her father did not consult her on what qualities she would like to see in a husband, nor did Eleni exchange a single word with Christos, but she was not unhappy when he arrived at the house one evening and her father directed her to bring the customary coffee. She didn’t even look at the stranger’s face as he took the cup and in its place on the tray put an
American $20 bill, saying, “This is for you.” She knew her future had been decided.

After the engagement was sealed with food, wine and a fusillade of bullets fired at the heavens to notify the neighbors, Eleni was allowed to converse with her fiancé on the occasions when she walked with her parents to church. Christos strutted at her side in his straw boater, his starched white shirtfront radiant in the sun, and told her that when he returned to Lia in a year or so, he would pay for the finest wedding the village had ever seen. He would bring cloth from America and hire the best dressmaker in the region to make the wedding costumes. Eleni spoke little; she didn’t know what to say to such a sophisticated man, but she loved listening to his stories of the wonders of the world beyond the mountains. He seemed so different from the rough, sun-blackened village youths. After Christos left the village, as she put the finishing touches on her dowry, Eleni reflected that she had been incredibly fortunate in her father’s choice of a husband.

True to his word, Christos returned in November of 1926, and on the last permissible day before the Christmas Lent, their wedding crowns were exchanged in the Church of St. Demetrios.

In a tearful conversation before the wedding Eleni told Christos that she would not be able to go to America with him. Her mother, whom she had always tried to protect from her father’s temper, insisted she would commit suicide on the day Eleni left the village. Christos was disappointed, but he was not angry or surprised. He knew that ties of blood superseded all others in village society. A woman was judged by her sense of duty to her aged parents almost as much as her dedication to her children. Eleni’s parents had no male heirs, and her elder sister, Nitsa, had not only married into a poor family but seemed unable to provide any grandchildren. After Eleni’s brilliant marriage, her parents’ welfare would be her responsibility.

Christos decided to spend at least a year in the village, setting up his bride in his mother’s household before returning to America. It was hardly unusual in the mountain villages for a husband and wife to spend much of their lives apart. The majority of men in Lia were itinerant tinkers and coopers who traveled far from their homes for most of the year, leaving their wives to farm the fields, rear the children, care for their parents and look after things until their husbands returned for a well-deserved period of idleness, which they spent exchanging stories in the
cafenions
, the village coffeehouses. The Greek emigrants who settled in foreign lands and supported their families by regularly mailed checks had only extended the traditional periods of absence. Christos was glad that Eleni would be there to look after his mother as well as her own parents.

He installed his bride in Fotini’s two-room house and brought workmen from Konitsa, a day’s walk to the northeast, to add on two more rooms, making it the largest dwelling in Lia. Before Christos left for America in 1928, Eleni gave birth to a girl. Two extended visits home over the next ten years produced four more children.

Now, with her mother-in-law dead, Eleni lived alone with the children, dependent on the checks her husband sent every month. She knew if that life line was cut and her husband disappeared into the golden land, forgetting his Greek family, as sometimes happened, their four young daughters would become beggars, with no chance of dowries, and her son, Nikola, would never see his father’s face.

At the thought of Nikola, Eleni’s eyes filled. She and Fotini had prayed so often for a boy. They lit daily candles, hid garlic under the pillow during Christos’ visits from America, bought malewort from the witches and brewed it into bitter tea. But each visit produced another girl. Though villagers began to mock Eleni, her mother-in-law never reproached her. She took each tiny girl in her hands and crooned songs of wedding veils, dowry chests and golden rings. The villagers whispered that Eleni could make only girls, but Fotini comforted her that it was God’s compensation for her own three girls who had died. These granddaughters, Olga, Kanta and Glykeria, would be her solace, Fotini said. She sat up with Eleni through their bouts of croup and whooping cough, rubbing their gums with home-distilled
tsipouro
when they fussed with teething pains.

The old woman and the young bride had been bound together by their shared struggles, and Eleni grieved that Fotini hadn’t lived to see the fourth girl, who bore her name, or the boy, who had finally answered their prayers.

The skull was passed to Eleni with the dregs of wine inside. Tonight it would rest at the left of the altar of St. Demetrios, and tomorrow it would be placed in the ossuary below the church, where more than two centuries of villagers’ bones lined the walls.

Eleni passed the Church of St. Demetrios every day and usually stopped to light a candle. Many times she had seen the basement cavern, where the wall of bones, the old ones stacked like kindling, glowed with a pale-yellow phosphorescence in the darkness. They did not frighten her; it was the natural epilogue. She felt comfortable surrounded by the hundreds of skulls, empty now of all love, sorrow, foolishness or wisdom, anonymously awaiting Judgment Day.

Eleni held the skull in her hands for a moment, feeling the firmness, the lightness of it, and decided not to drink. She had no fear that Fotini had left a curse against her. The woman had bequeathed her nothing but blessings; most of all the example of her own life.

Three days after the ceremony, the spurious summer of St. Demetrios was gone and a gray rain drummed on the slate roof of Eleni’s house in the highest part of Lia, Perivoli—the orchard.

The Perivoli was near the top of a triangle of green vegetation that spilled down the cleft between two naked granite peaks of the Mourgana mountain range, bisected by a deep ravine. Lia’s 150 crude stone huts clung precariously to each side of the ravine. The neighborhood of the Perivoli covered
the western bank, and the houses to the east, surrounding the village square with its giant plane tree, Holy Trinity Church and the schoolhouse, made up the middle village. As the land sloped more gently toward the foothills, scattered houses flanked the ancient Church of the Virgin to form the lower village. Below, the fertile triangle of holm oak, scrub pine and underbrush spread down into soft ripples of foothills, then rose ten miles in the distance to splash up against the other rim of the bowl of mountains that circumscribed the villagers’ universe; vast and complete, jagged mountain peaks piercing whipped-cream castles of cumulus clouds to the south, mists smoking up from the valley floor far below.

It was an isolated and magnificent world that every villager saw from his window; a constant reminder of the overwhelming power of nature and the insignificance of man. To his back, high above him, loomed the Mourgana range, its summit forming the border with Albania and closing the northern edge of his horizon. Lia stood at the center of the range, huddled below two heights like sentinels: the Prophet Elias, named for the tiny stone chapel on its tip, and a truncated peak called Kastro because it bore a crumbling acropolis, the fortress of the Hellenistic community that lived there three hundred years before Christ. To the east and west, tucked into folds of the mountain and out of sight of Lia, were ten more villages strung along the timberline, without even a road to connect them to the rest of the world. To the south, across the bowl of foothills, rose the gray bulks of mountains in the distance, like sounding whales: the double peak of Velouna on the east, named for its resemblance to an archer’s bow, flowed into the dark spine of the Great Ridge, which terminated in the smooth, scrub-covered hump of Plokista and the arched back of Taverra. Closing the rim to the west were smaller mountains, where the sun disappeared into the distant depths of Albania.