Eleni (71 page)

The prisoners would first stand to hear the charges read against them, Katis went on, then witnesses would be called to confirm those charges. Turning to face the defendants, he thundered, “We are not here today to condemn you. It is your fellow villagers who are your accusers. When their testimony is heard, we will render our judgment based on their evidence.”

“Vasili Nikou,” Katis began, and the gray-haired cooper slowly stood up, hindered by the fact that his arm was still tied to the wrist of Dina Venetis. “This man is a long-time fascist,” said Katis, each word sounding like a drop of rain falling on still water. “He stayed behind in the village in order to send information to the enemy and to promote hostility against the cause among his neighbors. He was a leading organizer of the escape of the twenty traitors and was planning more escapes until the day he was arrested.

“Spiro Michopoulos,” he shouted next, and the fidgeting, scarecrow figure unfolded itself like a jackknife. “This man pretended to be a supporter of our struggle. He was even appointed president of the village,” Katis intoned. “But he was in fact a fifth columnist in our midst who distributed work assignments unfairly to protect the supporters of the fascists and to promote hostility toward us from our loyal followers. While our fighters suffered and his neighbors went hungry, Spiro Michopoulos hoarded food and supplies for himself.” The expression of wronged innocence on Michopoulos’ gaunt face deepened and he began to deny the charges, but Katis cut him short and motioned him to sit down.

“Andreas Michopoulos,” he called out. The young guerrilla tried to stand up but could not succeed until his uncle pulled him up by the rope tied to both their wrists. “This traitor joined the Democratic Army so that he could betray us by giving information to those who wanted to escape,” Katis said. “Without his aid, they would not have succeeded in fleeing and taking information about our defenses and movements to the fascists.

“Constantina Drouboyiannis.” The round-faced little woman with small brown eyes and tomato-red cheeks stood up, trying to arrange her expression into something between penitence and obedience. “This woman is charged with sending her two daughters to escape from the village in the company of the other fascists while she was working in the threshing fields,” Katis said, glancing at some notes on the table.

“Dina Venetis,” he continued, and Dina stood up, her hands still tied to Vasili Nikou. “This woman, whose husband is an officer in the monarcho-fascist army, is charged with planning to escape from the village.

“Alexo Gatzoyiannis,” he shouted in a louder voice. Eleni had to nudge her sister-in-law to make her stand. “This woman not only arranged for her eldest daughter to escape with the traitors, but she has also betrayed our cause by providing secrets to her husband who visited her clandestinely on at least three occasions to collect information about the movements and activities of the People’s Army.” Alexo gave him a look of graphic contempt but said nothing.

Katis paused and surveyed the attentive faces before him. “Eleni Gatzoyiannis,” he announced in a softer voice, so that his listeners leaned forward. Eleni stood up and stared at the back of his balding head as he turned to the audience. “This woman is the daughter of a known fascist and the wife of an American capitalist,” he said. “Her husband’s country sends the bombs and planes to kill our men. She is charged with planning the escape from the village of four of her children as well as her mother and sister, her niece, and thirteen other fascist sympathizers who fled to take our secrets to the enemy.”

Eleni stood impassive as a statue until he motioned for her to sit down. “We will call fifteen witnesses against the accused,” Katis announced in a voice that sent an apprehensive shiver through the crowd. “These are your own neighbors, who will reveal how the defendants betrayed the revolution. We will also read corroborating testimony from other villagers about the treasonous activities of the accused. The defendants will then be allowed to speak on their own behalf, and any of you here who have information to add will be permitted to address the court.”

He paused and then said louder, “The justice of the Democratic Army, even in the midst of battle and revolution, is even-handed! It will separate the guilty from the innocent as clearly as oil from vinegar.”

Katis involuntarily glanced back at the defendants, then sideways at his fellow judges, pleased with the way he’d expressed himself. He turned back to the audience. “We will now call the witnesses. Each person summoned
will step forward and sit over there, to the right of the prisoners, until his turn comes to speak.”

As Katis began to call witnesses from a list in his hand, the crowd was distracted by a noise like thunder and a puff of smoke from the crest of the Great Ridge in the distance. Seeing the large crowd gathered in the square, the Greek National Army had chosen that moment to bomb the village. The first mortar shell raised a crater halfway up the peak of the Prophet Elias and the second crashed down to the east of the square, near the Church of St. Friday. As heads swiveled and mothers reached for their children, the third mortar landed only a hundred yards east of the square. With one movement the throng rose to its feet and began to shout. Katis stood stunned. The guerrillas in the crowd raised their rifles and everyone looked at them nervously, torn between their desire to flee and their fear of the guns. Katis began to perspire. Suddenly a mortar shell landed just on the edge of the square, in the space between the Church of the Holy Trinity and the great plane tree. The impact of the explosion sent everyone—judges, witnesses, prisoners and villagers—scrambling for safety, stripped of all concerns except the primal instinct of survival. Leaves, branches, stones, dirt and shrapnel sprayed everyone within yards of the tree; the prisoners were battered with a hail of branches. Still tied in pairs, they crowded and pushed, screaming, as was everyone else, to the nearest shelter.

When the shelling stopped there was silence, broken only by the sound of falling roof tiles and tree branches. As soon as the cloud of dust began to disperse, Katis stepped out from where he had huddled in a doorway and called the guerrillas together. “The trial is being suspended for this morning!” he shouted in a tight voice. “This spot is too exposed! We will reconvene this afternoon at five-thirty in the ravine below the Spring of Siouli. Everyone in the village must be present.”

Lowering his voice, Katis said to the guerrillas around him, “Gather the prisoners and take them back to police headquarters.”

After a few minutes as the square rapidly emptied, panic broke out among the guards. “The prisoner Constantina Drouboyiannis has disappeared!” someone shouted. Katis blanched. She was the only one who had not been tied, and now he realized that had been a mistake.

They found Constantina in a corner of the Kokkinos cellar, crouched behind a sack of flour. “I wasn’t trying to get away!” she wailed, covering her head with her hands against the anticipated blows. “I was just trying to save myself from the mortars like everybody else!” Weak with relief, Katis ordered her tied up at once for the remainder of the trial.

At the top of the Perivoli, just below the flat spot called the Vrisi where the villagers danced on the feast day of the Prophet Elias, the cliff fell straight down into a green, leafy ravine. On the side of the ravine, centuries of dripping water had carved a sort of grotto, a green, ferny alcove as big as
a large room. It was here that the judges’ table and chairs were set up, so that even if a mortar shell fell directly on them, they would be protected by the roof of stone. The streambed in front of the grotto was damp and swampy most of the year, but by August it had dried up, and the prisoners were seated on the flat polished stones directly before the judges. Rising from the streambed, the earth sloped gently upward into a concave bowl, and the villagers were told to arrange themselves on this grassy incline with the oldest men, the patriarchs of the village, in the front row.

The large ravine thus formed a perfect semicircular amphitheater, with the grotto as a natural stage. A magical place, it is usually carpeted by ferns uncurling delicate tendrils, dappled by ever-changing patterns of sun and shade, butterflies fragile as a thought fluttering through the cathedral-like hush of the hollow. But on that day, the butterflies were gone, and the ravine was filled with the uneasy murmur of several hundred voices, for the villagers on the ascending slopes knew they were more exposed to the danger of mortar shells than the guerrillas.

Katis finished calling the names of the fifteen villagers to be questioned as witnesses. He made them sit facing the judges and the prisoners, off to one side on the floor of the natural bowl. Among the group called forward were Stavroula Yakou, the blond favorite of the guerrillas; Alexandra Drouboyiannis, the swarthy, sharp-tongued sister-in-law of Constantina, who had gone on the second escape attempt; and her eldest daughter, Milia, who was wearing her uniform and carrying her rifle.

When the witnesses were assembled, Katis raised a hand for silence and began to read off the testimony he had collected against the first defendant, Vasili Nikou. Katis read the statements of twenty-two villagers to substantiate details of the old cooper’s treachery and disloyalty to the revolutionary struggle, to show that he was a fascist, organizing escapes from the village, sending information to the enemy. As Katis read their names, villagers who had whispered statements to the security police under the impression that they were speaking in confidence, paled and ducked their heads, trying to disappear among the crowd. Despite the dank coolness of the glen, cloying with the odor of laurel berries, many of the listeners began to perspire. Among those named as giving evidence against Nikou were Stavroula Yakou and Marianthe Ziaras, whose statements had been taken before the latter’s escape.

The two eldest daughters of Vasili Nikou sat near the top of the ravine, and they remember the testimony well. The first and most damaging witness called against their father was Foto Bollis, a hook-nosed little tinker who lived in a house near the Gatzoyiannis property with his wife and five children.

Foto Bollis had been caught out of the village in the midst of his tinker’s rounds when the guerrillas occupied Lia in November. But he was a fervent Communist, and on May 30, 1948, he had managed, along with Christos Skevis, a cousin of Spiro Skevis, to sneak through the government lines from Filiates back into the village.

“What do you know of the defendant, Vasili Nikou?” Katis demanded, like a prompter giving an actor his cues. Bollis drew himself up to his full height. Now he had a chance to make his fellow villagers pay for all the years they had ignored him.

“He’s black, black as midnight, poisoned with fascism to his fingernails!” he shouted. He plunged on, telling that when he had been stuck in Filiates behind the government lines, he often saw the fascists receiving intelligence reports sent from Vasili Nikou, detailing guerrilla activities in the Mourgana villages.

The second witness called was Stavroula Yakou, who defiantly returned the cold stares of the village women. As she stood proudly before the judges, the play of sunlight and shadow in the ravine emphasized the smoothness of her golden skin and the mane of honey-colored hair.

“He’s my mother-in-law’s brother, but the truth can’t be hidden,” she announced, casting a look of triumph toward her hated mother-in-law. Eleni saw Stavroula’s mother, her old friend Anastasia, turn her face away. “When Vasili Nikou was assigning work details, he sent weak old women to carry the wounded,” Stavroula continued, unabashed, “so that the wounded fighters would be dropped or die before they got medical help. And once, when his own mule was wanted for a work detail, Nikou put a nail in its hoof so that it couldn’t walk.”

The next witness called against Nikou was one of his fellow prisoners, Constantina Drouboyiannis, who now had her hands prominently bound together to foil another disappearance like the one that morning. Katis read a statement Constantina had made about an incident that occurred when she once called Vasili Nikou to fix a lock on a door of her house. As he worked, according to Constantina, he told her, “You’re a lucky woman! You’ve managed to send your daughters away and saved them. But what about my daughters? What am I going to do?”

“Did the defendant Nikou say this to you?” Katis prompted. The woman glanced at him nervously, then lowered her eyes, as if examining the ropes that bound her hands, and nodded faintly.

Suddenly Anagnostakis stood up, a movement that startled Katis. He knew that all the judges had the right to question the witnesses, but he had orchestrated this trial so carefully in his mind that he hadn’t expected any of them to intervene. Anagnostakis was the last person he wanted tampering with his carefully prepared witnesses.

“Were any other people in the room when the defendant said this to you?” Anagnostakis asked in a soft voice.

Constantina looked at him in confusion, wondering if she had somehow missed her cue. “No,” she replied. “He wouldn’t have said it if there was anyone around,” she added, as if explaining to a child.

“So he told you this in confidence because he trusted you?” Anagnostakis asked.

Constantina’s already ruddy cheeks took on a deeper hue. She nodded. “Then why are you betraying his trust now?” he persisted.

Constantina looked from one judge to another, completely at sea. She turned from Katis’ frowning face back to the younger man, who seemed kindly. “Because I’m afraid!” she blurted out. A murmur ruffled the silence of the crowd.

This was the last thing Katis wanted to hear because it gave the transfixed audience the clear impression that the witnesses were being terrorized into making their statements. He made an impatient gesture at the bewildered Constantina. “But tell the truth, woman, did Vasili Nikou in fact make this statement to you or not? Is your testimony a lie?”

She studied him for a minute, then answered, in a nearly inaudible voice. “He said it.”

As Katis surveyed the audience, with a sideways glance at Anagnostakis, trying to gauge how much damage Constantina Drouboyiannis’ testimony had done, Eleni remembered the woman’s tearful face on the day she was brought into Katis’ office to confront her. Clearly she was trying to save herself by testifying against the others.