Eleni (63 page)

The youngest of Foto Gatzoyiannis’ nine children, Niki was questioned from ten in the morning until late in the afternoon by Sotiris. Niki had known all about the planned escape. She had even watched her sister Arete and her mother bury a fifteen-pound spool of solder—the principal wealth of Arete’s tinker husband—in an isolated field below Alexo’s house.

Niki expected Sotiris to grill her about her sister’s escape, but then he threw her off guard by demanding to know where Arete had hidden the solder. Niki realized that someone must have seen them hiding it, but she shook her head dumbly. Then Sotiris asked her how many times her father had sneaked back into the village to collect secrets about the guerrilla movements. “Never!” the girl replied, and backed up as Sotiris came toward her.

“Everyone knows your father acts as a guide for the fascists,” the intelligence officer shouted. “He’s been spying for them too, and your mother has been helping him.”

In a thin, reedlike voice Niki denied knowing anything about solder, escape plots or visits from her father. Sotiris’ eyes flickered and he slapped her so hard that her ears roared.

“All you can say is ‘No’!” he shouted. “We’ll put you in there”—pointing to the cellar—“and soon you’ll have plenty to tell us!” But after several hours of inquisition, Sotiris released the girl with the warning: “Think about our questions. We’re going to bring you back again and the next time we want the truth.”

The first moment they could talk to each other, Eleni whispered to Alexo that Niki had been brought in and questioned. The girl had suffered no more than a few slaps, she reassured her sister-in-law, but the older woman turned the color of candle wax. The next morning Sotiris called Alexo in and announced, “Your daughter Niki told us all about the solder that you hid on your property. Like all possessions of traitors, it belongs rightfully to the Democratic Army. Are you going to show us where it’s hidden or shall we beat the information out of your daughter?”

Alexo nodded, in defeat. She knew that by pointing out the solder, she was weakening her claim to ignorance of the plot, but she had to do it to save the child. “I’ll take you there,” she said, and Sotiris smiled for the first time since the escape.

As head of intelligence gathering in Lia, Sotiris Drapetis knew that the mass defection was not only an indelible blot on his record but a possible threat to his survival. After the disaster, the Epiros Command had sent the man called Katis, who served in the judicial branch both as judge and investigating officer, to find out what had happened.

It was Katis who had made such a strong impression on the villagers with his spellbinding voice and urbane manner when he conducted the trial of the soldier captured during Pergamos. He was also the judge who sentenced the four officers captured in Povla to be executed. Now Katis was in Lia to unearth the reasons for the escape, and his breath was hot on Sotiris’ neck. Sotiris interrogated the relatives of the fugitives with the desperation of a drowning man. After a week of this, Katis called the intelligence officer into his office and demanded to know what he had learned. Sotiris came up with an answer which he hoped would make him look less culpable. “I’m convinced that it was organized on the outside by the fascists who came from Filiates and led their relatives out,” Sotiris told him. He paused momentously and added, “And they’re going to try again.”

Katis leaned forward, frowning under his heavy brows. “Is this what you’ve learned from the women you’ve been interrogating?”

Sotiris lowered his eyes to the pile of papers in front of Katis, the summary of the interrogations. “Well, so far the suspects persist in saying they knew nothing,” he began nervously. “But Alexo Gatzoyiannis has admitted hiding solder for her daughter Arete before the escape, which seems to prove that she was in on the plot.”

“Seems!” Katis shouted in a voice that made Sotiris jump. “Koliyiannis personally sent me here to find out how this fiasco happened—who was responsible—and to make such examples of the traitors that no one else will ever again think of defecting. I need evidence; I don’t want to know about how things
seem
to you.”

“Of course, we
could
get confessions from the women under detention if we increase the pressure on them,” Sotiris said quickly. “But they’re only the tip of the iceberg. That wouldn’t get us the fascists who came and took the others out.”

“You’re sure the twenty were led out?” Katis asked, lifting a skeptical eyebrow as he took a noisy sip from a small cup of coffee.

“All my informants in the village are convinced of it,” Sotiris replied. “They say it was Kitso Haidis, father of the Amerikana, and Foto Gatzoyiannis, her husband’s brother. Both men are notorious fascists, sir. If we captured them, the two biggest fish from this village, it would demonstrate our reach and squelch any more thoughts of crossing over.”

“Are you volunteering to go to Filiates and bring them back?” Katis asked dryly.

“We can lure them back,” Sotiris said, trying his best to sound convincing. “The two people they wanted most, the Gatzoyiannis women, are still in our hands because they were in the threshing fields on the night of the escape. If we release the women as bait and watch them closely, we’ll wind up getting everyone with one stroke: the fascists, the women and the others in the village who are preparing to go with them!”

“Others are planning to escape?” Katis asked, his cup clattering into its saucer.

“My informants suspect as many as thirty,” Sotiris replied knowingly.

“All right, let them go,” Katis conceded. “If it’s an outside conspiracy, and more are joining it, then they’ve all got to be crushed. But if you manage to lose either of those women or any other traitors, you’ll end up wishing your father had masturbated on the night he conceived you.”

The shine of perspiration was visible on Sotiris’ upper lip as he saluted and turned to go.

On the eighth day of their captivity, Eleni, Alexo and Marianthe were called by Sotiris into the good chamber. He handed them each a document summarizing the testimony they had given—that they were ignorant of any escape plot—and they signed it. Then he informed them that they were being released. Guards would escort each of them home, he said. From now on they must not be seen talking to one another or communicating in any way. They were not to go near the boundaries of the village. And every personal possession of their relatives who had fled must be handed over.

As she was led down the path, Eleni steeled herself for the sight of the house: the hearth, the niches and corners, all silent and empty of her children’s presence. But she wasn’t prepared for what she saw inside the broken door: clothes on the floor, pallets slashed, even the icon tossed in a corner. She stood in the doorway and stared at the chaos as the guerrillas began collecting things. They had been ordered to leave a minimum amount
of clothing and food for Eleni to survive. They took all the supplies except for a few pounds of flour, all the clothes except for Eleni’s brown dress, and most of the animals, leaving her two goats and four sheep.

Watching the guerrillas packing up her belongings, Eleni consoled herself that she still had the fields—the beans and corn that had not been harvested. As she waited for them to finish, she pushed the door open all the way and felt something blocking it. She peered around behind it to find Nikola’s beige-and-brown book bag, the one he had carried to school so proudly in the days before the guerrillas came. It held his scrawled and smudged notebooks and his cherished Byzantine sword blade. The sight of his satchel made Eleni realize he was really gone. She could imagine him carefully packing his treasures and then at the last moment leaving them behind because someone told him the bag was too heavy to carry such a long way. The notebooks were all she had left of him.

She bit her lip, determined to stay in control until the guerrillas were gone. As soon as they led away the protesting goats and kids, she slumped to the floor and gathered the book bag into her arms, letting the tears come.

Eleven-year-old Niki Gatzoyiannis was at home when she saw her mother approaching, trailed by two guerrillas and a mule. She ran out and embraced her, but Alexo silently continued on past the house to the field below and pointed to a spot where the guerrillas began to dig. They quickly uncovered the spool of solder that Arete had hidden before her escape. Niki’s heart was racing. She knew that her mother was implicating herself. Alexo stood silently, her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, as the guerrillas loaded things on the mule and went away. When they were out of earshot, Niki whispered, “Mother, why on earth did you show them the solder?”

Alexo looked at her. “Didn’t you tell them about it? They said you did.”

Niki grew indignant. “I didn’t tell them a thing, even when they hit me!”

Alexo realized that she had been tricked: she had played into Sotiris’ hands, trying to protect her daughter. She put one arm around the girl, leading her back into the house. “What does it matter?” Alexo said. “Let them have the solder. At least they let me go.”

Giorgina Bardaka was not released with the other three women. She was the only one who had been in the village on the night of the escape, and Sotiris suspected that she knew all about the conspiracy, despite her claim that her family had abandoned her.

On the twelfth day of her captivity, Giorgina was taken out of the security prison, still carrying her tiny daughter, who was wrapped in the traditional swaddling clothes. Two other women—strangers to her—were brought out of the cellar to join them. Three guerrillas carrying shovels led the prisoners
down the path, past the Haidis gate, on down and across the ravine to the churchyard behind the rubble of the Church of the Virgin.

One of the women with Giorgina was in her early forties and wore a large key tied to her belt. The other was older, perhaps fifty, and she was the first to be ordered to dig her own grave. She worked doggedly, in silence, her callused hands trembling. When she had dug a narrow channel only about a foot deep and long enough to contain her body, the guerrillas made her sit in it. One of them shot her with his rifle from a few yards away, blowing off the entire back of her skull.

Then it was the turn of the younger woman with the key on her belt. The whole time she was digging, she wept and screamed, “Michalaki! My son, where are you?” They had to force her to sit in the grave, and she was still crying out “Michalaki!” when the bullet opened her skull and she died, flapping like a gutted fish.

The guerrillas turned to Giorgina Bardaka and told her to put down her baby in the shade of a nearby tree. They handed her a shovel and one of them said, “You can still save yourself by naming those who organized the escape.” Her mind numb with terror, Giorgina took the handle of the shovel and began to make a few scratches in the earth. Everything seemed warped, as if she was seeing through a pane of flawed glass. She began to tremble uncontrollably. A terrible pain shot across her chest and she fainted. “I don’t know how long I was unconscious,” she recalls, “but when I came to, they picked me up and said, ‘You’re lucky you have a baby.’ They carried me back to where she was lying and let me go. But I couldn’t walk; they had to help me back to my house.”

For a long time after that, Giorgina couldn’t speak about the aborted execution without fainting. Today she’s a good-natured woman of fifty-eight with salt-and-pepper hair who lives in an Athens suburb with her husband, a baker. But several times a year Giorgina starts to tremble, the pain rips through her chest and she faints, although doctors can find nothing physically wrong with her.

The morning after Eleni was released from the jail, she awoke in the empty house and went out to the yard to stare at the great mauve and gray-green bowl of the foothills spread below her, the cloudless sky arching over it like a dome. She watched a hawk lazily circling in the heavens and fiercely envied it its freedom. Later that morning, when she went out the gate to draw water from the spring, Eleni discovered a small pile of cigarette butts. Someone had crouched there all night, watching her.

There were no walls, no chains limiting her movement, but amid the infinite vastness of her familiar mountains, Eleni was as much a prisoner as the captives in the cellar of her house. Her feelings of claustrophobia became stronger every day. As she moved about the fields and ravines, the invisible fetters that trapped her there became heavier. Like a zoo animal
compulsively exploring the boundaries of its cage, Eleni wandered about the periphery of the village, often going far down to the southern fields and staring toward the distant mountains which hid her children.

One day Olga Venetis, her neighbor in the Perivoli, was climbing down past the Haidis house to irrigate one of her family’s fields on the southern boundary. She saw a small brown figure far below, climbing the path, and recognized Eleni, who carried a load of kindling on her back, stopping now and then to add to the burden. Olga shouted and signaled and Eleni approached slowly, walking like a woman much older than her forty-one years. When they were close enough to speak, Eleni said, “Come by my house in a little while so that we can talk. But don’t come by the path, stick to the back gardens so no one will see us together.”

Olga nodded and continued on. When she made her roundabout way back to the Haidis garden, Eleni quickly opened the door and pulled her inside. The two embraced and Eleni told Olga about her wanderings. “I’ve been as far down as the monastery of St. Athanassios, pretending to gather wood,” she said. “They watch me at night but today I didn’t see anyone. I could just have kept going and reached the other side.”

“Why didn’t you?” Olga asked.

“I can’t leave with Glykeria still in their hands,” Eleni replied. “They’d kill her! I don’t think they’re going to kill me—otherwise they would have done it already, but if I leave, it would be her death.”

Olga looked at her friend’s drawn, sallow face and felt her despair; she had two little boys herself—Dimitri, five, and Yiorgo, three. “Let’s go together,” she said impulsively. “Let’s go now. I’ll get my boys. You can carry one on your back and I’ll carry the other.”