Eleni (65 page)

Soula nervously thought of the time she had lent Eleni some salt. She hurried down to see Tassina Bartzokis, who had been Eleni’s next-door neighbor and close friend. “If you should see Eleni coming up here, tell her to turn back,” Soula implored her. “Even though she means no harm, they’ll use her visit against us.”

Eleni also remembered the favor of the salt, and one day in late July, having picked more beans than she could possibly use for herself, she set out for her old neighborhood to take some to Soula Botsaris in return for her charity. As Eleni passed the old washing pond above her house, Tassina saw her and began walking along beside her, speaking under her breath. “How are you?” she asked uneasily.

“As you would expect,” Eleni replied. “I’m taking Soula some beans for her children.”

Tassina looked nervously about and whispered what Soula had said. “It’s better for you to go back home, Eleni, and not to visit her,” she urged.

“Thank God you told me,” Eleni said sadly. “I didn’t mean to do her harm. Here, you take the beans for your children. I won’t come up again.”

Tassina hesitated, torn between her fear of being implicated and her need for food to give her family. She was silent for a moment, then said, looking rather shamefaced, “Perhaps you’d better walk by the other side of the house and throw the bag into the courtyard as you pass. I’d rather not be seen taking anything from you.”

Tassina remembers that Eleni turned away without a word. When Tassina returned home she found the sack of beans lying in her yard. She picked it up with a mixture of relief and guilt and never spoke to Eleni again.

As Eleni walked about the village, avoiding former friends and neighbors for fear that she might do them harm, watching women she had known all her life turn away from her, she was struck by the irony of her position. She had always scrupulously obeyed the rules of village behavior while secretly feeling like an outsider. Now she couldn’t leave, and she was stunned by the hostility that surrounded her. Perhaps she really was an alien and everyone had realized it at last. She was reminded of the baby chicks, dyed a brilliant scarlet, which were sometimes sold by traveling peddlers during the Easter season to amuse children. They rarely survived for more than a few days unless they were kept isolated in a cage, because the ordinary fowl, outraged at their unconventional plumage, would peck the bewildered fledglings to death.

Nikola was pulled out of the sea by one of the boys who had laughed at his hand-knit underwear. They held him upside down and shook him, then kneaded his stomach. When he finished retching and lay embarrassed on the sand, he looked up at his rescuers, and for lack of anything else to say, murmured, “Why does the water taste so bad?” They shouted with laughter. “Because it’s salt, bumpkin!” one of the boys exclaimed. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you the sea is salt?”

Chastened, Nikola got dressed and headed back up the hill toward the unfinished house, determined not to tell anyone about his near-drowning. He had imagined that swimming would be as natural and pleasant as flying is to a bird, but now he had acquired a fear of the ocean that he would never quite conquer.

He returned to find the family in great excitement. “Where have you been?” Olga scolded. “We have to go at once to the refugee office! They’re going to give us a relief payment.”

The bureaucrat who handed each member of the family 150 drachmas picked his ears with the clawlike nail of his little finger and delivered a lecture as he put the paper money in Nikola’s hand. “This is yours, and you can spend it any way you want,” he announced, “but you must buy something sensible that you need—food or clothing.”

Nikola nodded solemnly. He was quickly calculating in his head: with 150 drachmas he could buy fifteen pieces of
reveni
or several of the rubber balls the boys had been playing with, or some more school books or several pairs of stockings. But what he really wanted was something to take the taste of the sea water out of his mouth. As soon as he could, he returned to the waterfront, clutching the fortune in his hand. He stood for a long time in front of the shop window full of pastries before finally moving on to a candy store nearby where a huge box of white, sugary cubes of
loukoumi
—Turkish delight—caught his eye. The box cost nearly 100 drachmas.

Nikola bought the whole box and carried it to the tree stump in his secret thinking place. One cube at a time, he ate the
loukoumi:
the sweetest of all confections, the synonym for feminine beauty; a gelatinous, chewy candy, crunchy with chopped almonds, covered in thick snowdrifts of confectioners’ sugar. Each melting bite seemed to mask the bitter salt-bile taste of the sea and lessen the emptiness inside him. But then he stopped and the acrid taste of salt and the hollow ache of loneliness returned. He wished he were back in his house in the Perivoli with his mother. But no one had
loukoumi
in Lia. He reached for another piece.

Eventually, as the sun was beginning to set, his uncle Andreas found Nikola sitting on the ground, leaning against the stump, clutching his stomach. The empty
loukoumi
box told its own story. Gently Andreas carried the boy back to the house. After Nikola was repeatedly dosed with camomile tea and began to think he might survive, his sisters scolded him for squandering his relief money on a box of candy. Then they laughed at his prank and wrote about it to his father, who sent back a letter of stern reproach to his son for his irresponsibility. The boy was abject; he desperately wanted to please the father he had never seen, and now he had made him angry. Nikola spent more and more time down by the tree stump brooding and nursing his loneliness.

By the end of July, Eleni, Alexo and Marianthe had been free for nearly a month, but the guerrillas shadowing them had not found a shred of evidence that they were conspiring with one another or meeting with fascists from the other side. Sotiris could feel the noose tightening around his neck and redoubled his efforts to justify his conspiracy theory by calling in more informants from the village. There was no lack of women willing to give testimony against the Amerikana. They resented seeing Eleni walking about the village alive and well after her whole family had succeeded in slipping through the guerrillas’ fingers. She had always had privileges and an easy life, the village women muttered, and it was time she was toppled from her high horse.

The road up to the security-police station was busy with women who came to whisper about the Amerikana: that she had ordered her daughters to wear kerchiefs around their faces to hide them from the eyes of the guerrillas; that she had hidden her husband’s fine American clothes and her daughter’s dowry from the fighters of the Democratic Army. Who knows how much wealth in food and sovereigns she had cached away somewhere? they would ask with knowing expressions.

Sotiris doggedly recorded each innuendo, but he knew he didn’t have enough to convict the Amerikana or to retrieve his reputation with his superior officers. You couldn’t kill a woman for wearing a kerchief or hiding a jacket. What he needed was proof of a village-wide conspiracy tied to the fascists on the other side.

Then one day Sotiris received a piece of information that seemed to be the break he had been waiting for.

It came indirectly from Andreas Michopoulos, who had been on duty at the Church of the Virgin on the night of the escape. Although Andreas was badly frightened by the grillings he received immediately after the flight, he had by now recovered his cockiness and continued to exploit his uniform to impress his friends in the village. He had a crush on a sixteen-year-old village girl named Magda Kyrkas, and one day when he was visiting her house, the subject of the escape came up. “Oh, there are plenty of others who would like to follow in their footsteps!” Andreas said airily. “Just the other day Dina Venetis came up to me and said, ‘Andreas, if someone was to leave the village, what would be the safest route to take?’”

This remark was overheard by an
andartina
from the village of Parakalomo who was billeted in the Kyrkas house, and she dutifully went to the security police to report it. Sotiris gripped the desk in excitement. He was certain that Andreas knew more than he had admitted. Sotiris ordered the boy brought back to the police station, and this time made sure that he was beaten thoroughly. Like most bullies, Andreas could not tolerate pain; the blows and kicks of the security police soon had him babbling the names of fellow villagers who he claimed were preparing to leave. Sotiris was jubilant. One by one he arrested the people named and interrogated them, locking them up in the cellar along with the terrified Andreas.

Under the flexible rods and cleated boots of the security police, each villager swore complete loyalty to the cause and tried to stop the beating by suggesting other villagers who they were certain were harboring thoughts of escape. But after a week had passed, with the number of arrests snowballing, Sotiris despondently admitted to himself that he would have to discard the hope of trapping fascists from the outside. Although the villagers were eager enough to implicate one another, none of them had seen anyone from nationalist territory sneaking into the village to organize subversion. The scapegoats would have to be found among those still in Lia.

When Sotiris delivered his files on the new arrests and interrogations to Katis, he knew he was in for a painful scene, and the investigating magistrate showed no mercy. He castigated Sotiris for failing to prove anything about a conspiracy or even to come up with any solid evidence. He acidly pointed out that headquarters’ patience had been stretched beyond its limits. Ringleaders and traitors had to be named; a concrete case had to be built against them, and quickly. The Gatzoyiannis women had been walking about the village at liberty for weeks, and instead of serving as bait to trap other traitors, they were only flaunting their treachery, giving the village the impression that the DAG could be defied with impunity.

Sotiris sat up late that night poring over his files. He had heard whispers that the Drouboyiannis women knew something. The three sisters-in-law all lived in the section of the village near St. Friday, and one of them, Chrysoula, had been part of the escape, taking her two nieces, the daughters
of Constantina Drouboyiannis, with her while their mother was at the threshing field. Sotiris ordered both Constantina and Alexandra Drouboyiannis brought in for questioning.

Ever since the day of the escape, they had been living in terror of being arrested. Alexandra was the dark, irascible woman who came with two of her daughters on the second escape attempt and grew hysterical when the fog spoiled their plans.

When Constantina, a dull-witted, gregarious woman, was ordered to go to the threshing fields, she had turned her own two daughters over to her other sister-in-law, the childless Chrysoula, saying, “If you can find any way to escape while I’m gone, take the girls with you.” She had heard from Alexandra about the two failed escape attempts. Now Constantina burst into tears at the sight of the guerrillas at her door and wished she had never given her daughters to their aunt. They were free and she would have to pay for their deliverance.

Disgusted at Sotiris’ failure to produce anything concrete, Katis decided to conduct the interrogation of the Drouboyiannis women himself. The investigating magistrate had set up his office just below the security headquarters in the home of Kostina Thanassis, the grandmotherly old woman who had brought Nikola a treat of marmalade on the eve of the escape. An incorrigible busybody, Kostina liked to eavesdrop near Katis’ door while he questioned prisoners, and she reported many details of what went on there to her neighbors. Now, when she saw Constantina Drouboyiannis being led in weeping, she patted the woman’s arm sympathetically and whispered, “Whatever you know, dear, for God’s sake tell them and it may save you!” Constantina nodded tearfully. She realized she was not very clever and she was terrified of being caught in a web of lies. She decided to cooperate with the guerrillas and reveal whatever she knew, leaving out, of course, the fact that she had begged Chrysoula to take her daughters to the other side. After all, she had been in the threshing field on the day of the escape and no one could repeat what she had said except for Chrysoula, who was now far beyond the guerrillas’ reach.

A few hours later Katis sent an urgent summons to Sotiris, and the intelligence officer nearly ran down the path to the office of the investigating magistrate. On the way he passed the two Drouboyiannis women, bruised and weeping, being led up toward the jail. The guards told him that Katis wanted them confined in the upstairs rooms, isolated from the other prisoners. Sotiris swore under his breath. If Katis had managed to unearth something that had escaped his own informants, he was in serious trouble. He brushed past the hovering figure of Kostina Thanassis and into the office of the hawk-faced Katis, who sat twiddling a string of onyx worry beads behind his desk, evidently lost in thought. Then the eyes of the magistrate focused on Sotiris with a small gleam of satisfaction and his melodious voice said, “I want you to get the daughter of Alexandra Drouboyiannis, who’s with our company up at Skitari, back here as fast as you can.”

“You mean Milia?” Sotiris replied, mystified. “But what could she know about the escape? She’s only eighteen and one of the most dedicated guerrillas we have. She was at Skitari on the day they left.”

Katis produced a smile that made Sotiris’ skin crawl. “It seems that there were two previous escape attempts, before the traitors succeeded in leaving,” he announced. “They started out two times under your noses and turned back, and you never knew it!” He paused momentously. “And the Amerikana was with them! She organized it all. If we can get convincing witnesses to testify to this in public, we have enough evidence to hang her and everyone associated with her!”

It was at the beginning of August, during the two-week Lent that precedes the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, when a neighbor, Eugenia Petsis, called Eleni down from her bean field to the deserted mill where Eugenia lived with her daughter. “I’ve just made a
skotaria
from goat’s intestines,” she said, trying to cheer up Eleni, who had become thin as a rail, with purple hollows under her eyes. “Come, sit down, have some with us.”