Eleni (76 page)

Katis called in his interrogators in the security police. He ordered them to concentrate on the Amerikana, using whatever forms of torture were necessary to make her admit to hiding possessions and money. She must be broken, publically humiliated and made to confess to those crimes. The same methods were to be used on the other condemned Liotes, especially the former village president Spiro Michopoulos, to wring out of them every detail of the treason they had committed against the Democratic Army and their fellow villagers.

No one survived to describe the exact methods of torture used against the condemned villagers, but it is known that they were all submitted to
falanga
, and Eleni suffered it more severely than the others. She was taken out of the cellar and tortured, perhaps in a room upstairs, perhaps in the hidden part of the garden behind the house.

It takes three men to administer
falanga
. The victim is stripped of shoes and stockings and made to lie on the ground or a table. Two men slip the bare feet between the barrel of a rifle and its strap, twisting the gun until the strap presses the balls of the feet tightly back, exposing the soles. While
two men hold the rifle rigid, a third applies the blows to the soles of the feet with a metal or wooden rod.

As a method of punishment,
falanga
has many advantages, which accounts for its popularity in every country where organized political torture is the norm. Each blow of the rod is felt not just on the soles of the feet, painfully flexed upward as the club smashes the delicate nerves between the heel and balls of the foot; the pain shoots up the stretched muscles of the leg and explodes in the back of the skull. The whole body is in agony and the victim writhes like a worm, soon losing all control, although never passing out. The primary virtue
of falanga
is that it does not leave the kind of marks that other tortures do, like burning cigarettes. But in Eleni’s case it must have been mismanaged, because the next time any of the villagers saw her, her legs were swollen to twice their normal size and entirely black from the beatings. She was unable to walk and could speak only with difficulty.

It probably took a few days of concentrated torture before Eleni was completely broken to the point where she not only confessed to hiding Olga’s dowry and other valuables in the bean field but agreed with every accusation Katis made against her. The first time the village saw her again was several days after the trial. What emerged from the cellar prison was a far different figure from the self-contained woman, her features composed beneath the dark kerchief, who had parried Katis’ questions.

Tassina Bartzokis was at her kitchen window when she saw Eleni being led out of the prison gate on a mule, leaning heavily against the back of the wooden saddle. Tassina’s eyes widened in horror at the sight of her closest friend, whom she could scarcely recognize. Eleni’s hair was no longer covered with a kerchief, but hung loose and unkempt, like that of women performing penance on the Virgin’s feast day. Her dress, which had always been modestly buttoned up to her neck, was open, exposing a V of white flesh mottled with bruises. Her legs, swollen to freakish dimensions, were naked and wrapped in rags. She could barely sit erect on the wooden saddle, but when Tassina came out into the yard to look closer, Eleni met her eyes with a flicker of recognition. Three guerrillas preceded the mule, one carrying a shovel, another a pick; and two riderless packhorses followed behind. At this sight Tassina felt fear wash through her stomach and into her bowels.

Farther down the path at the bottom of the Perivoli another close friend, Angeliki Botsaris Daikos, saw the procession passing by. Consumed with curiosity about what was being done to her neighbor, she took an empty barrel as if to gather water from the spring below, and circling around, came toward the Haidis house from the back.

A third woman who remembers the event was Ourania Haidis. She was married to one of Eleni’s cousins, but when she saw her kinswoman passing by, Ourania and her mother-in-law hid, watching the proceedings from behind their shutters, too frightened to show themselves.

The only neighbor who had the courage to come over and ask what was happening was Vasiliki Petsis. She came out of her yard and over to the Haidis gate, where the procession had come to a halt. Eleni never got down from the saddle—her legs were far too swollen for her to walk. She only sat there and pointed toward the Haidis bean field. “It’s there, under the patch of dry beans,” she said to the guerrillas in an unnatural voice. Vasiliki recalled the day, during the time Eleni was released from the prison and living alone, that she had asked her why she neglected to irrigate that particular patch of beans. “Why bother?” was Eleni’s laconic reply. “Who’s going to live to eat them?”

Now, while the guerrillas dug at the spot with their shovel and pick, ripping up the parched bean plants, Vasiliki crept close to where Eleni was sitting on the mule, her chin on her chest, her back propped against the backrest of the saddle.

“Eleni, child!” Vasiliki whispered. The prisoner raised her head and her eyes focused on her neighbor with difficulty. Slowly she lifted a trembling hand and gestured for her to leave. It was difficult to understand the words that issued from the swollen, cracked lips. “Go,” Vasiliki heard her say, “or they’ll do the same to you.” But the older woman hung around long enough to see what the guerrillas unearthed: several large copper pots full of clothing, linens and
velenzes
—Olga’s cherished dowry.

The guerrillas fell to their knees and scrabbled among the contents of the pots, pulling everything out on the ground. Their faces fell as they realized that the clothing and linens were all rotten, covered with a gray-green mold, the fabrics falling apart in their hands. Somehow, water had seeped through and as they pulled each object out, they threw it away in disgust.

The guerrillas fumbled through the mess and shouted as they found solid objects; perhaps the treasure Sotiris had told them about. But it was only some copper pots and pans, a corroded pitcher and a framed photograph that was no longer recognizable. They cheered as they unearthed some tins of canned meat and powdered milk. Angeliki Botsaris, hiding nearby with her empty water barrel, crept closer to see what Eleni had hidden. She remembers the guerrillas spreading on the ground some “American towels, like nothing we had ever seen, thick, with flowers on them. And there was even a jar of honey.”

“You can see what the fascist traitor has hidden away, what wealth!” the head of the guerrillas shouted to the silent, watching windows of the nearby houses. They made a great show of gathering up the things, but clearly they were disappointed; they had hoped to find a treasure and had come up with only some mildewed blankets and linens. Angrily they packed all the goods on the backs of two horses, to take them up to the commissary, where they were carefully spread out in the yard so that everyone in the village could see what the Amerikana had buried in her garden. The mule with the prisoner on it was led at the head of the parade of plunder in a slow procession back up the path to the Perivoli.

Eleni Gatzoyiannis, expressionless and slumped in the saddle, passed before the horrified and fascinated eyes of her neighbors as she was led back into the cellar of her house.

During the last seven days, the anchor that Eleni used to keep her tenuous grip on sanity was her thoughts of her children. Shortly after the trial, probably when she was brought up to the good chamber in preparation for the first round of torture, she found a way to leave a message that would reach them after she was dead, her only written testament.

Eleni was left alone for a brief time in the good chamber, which had been the show place of her home before it was made into an office for the security police. Her eyes automatically sought the iconostasis, which hung in the eastern corner. It was a glass-fronted triangular wooden box holding the family’s icons. Eleni had never permitted any of the children to touch it; attending to the iconostasis was her personal duty. She walked up to look at the familiar framed image of the Virgin and Child—the centerpiece of the iconostasis. Inside the small cabinet, before the Virgin, there still sat a red Easter egg, a sprig of laurel from the Palm Sunday mass, and a small bottle of water blessed by the priest on Epiphany. Around the edge were tucked a half-dozen small cardboard images of saints and holy figures, each one purchased many years ago in Filiates or Yannina to commemorate some special blessing or feast day.

Eleni stared into the Virgin’s face, her heart tight with worry about her children. She knew she was to die, probably to be buried in some obscure ravine or in her own yard, and she imagined her children returning after the war, searching for her throughout northern Greece and perhaps in the Communist countries. She wanted to tell them her fate and at the same time console them that she was at peace under the protection of the Holy Virgin.

Suddenly Eleni reached up and pulled out one of the small cardboard icons tucked into the rim of the cabinet. Then she went to the desk used by the police and snatched up a fountain pen. She tried to think what she could write that would tell them she was to be killed and yet not be so incriminating that she would be further punished by the guerrillas if they found it.

Eleni was holding a small paper icon of a brown-eyed Madonna in scarlet robes, smaller than a playing card; about three inches high and two wide. She turned it over and hurriedly scrawled on the back:

She wrote in bold, firm black strokes, the lines slanting upward in her haste. The letters show that her hand was not yet palsied with the effects of the torture. But because she was hurrying so, she made several mistakes in forming letters, which she swiftly crossed out and wrote over. Those few words took up five lines on the back of the narrow card and she centered her name on a line by itself, the way it would appear on a tombstone.

Eleni studied what she had written. If they found it, the guerrillas would not realize she had written it about herself, but her children would know her handwriting and understand she was dead. She imagined their tears when they returned to the house for the first time in search of her and discovered her message in the iconostasis. Then she took the pen and scribbled in ever smaller letters to make it fit:

In tiny letters below it she signed
“Mana.”

As she began to put the card back in the iconostasis, Eleni thought of Alexo, whose children would also be hunting for their mother, not knowing what had become of her. She scribbled a last line, fitting it in with difficulty around the bottom of what she had already written: “God have mercy also on the soul of Alexandra.”

Hearing the sound of approaching footsteps, Eleni threw down the pen and ran to the iconostasis, where she opened the glass door and shoved the tiny card behind the large framed icon of the Virgin and Child. She had barely closed it and turned around when the door opened to admit the guerrillas who would administer her torture.

Pain beyond the limits of endurance destroys the mind as well as the body, driving it to take refuge in madness. Spiro Michopoulos had always been weak, a result of his near-death from tuberculosis, and by the time he died, the torture had reduced him to a slavering, trembling creature, unable to walk or speak. But to his last intelligible breath Michopoulos cried that he had always been loyal to the Democratic Army. Despite the torture, the guerrillas never managed to wring out of the former village president the location of any more hoards of goods besides the chests that had been dug up from the cellar of his house.

Andreas Michopoulos was more or less left alone, for Katis knew that Andreas’ execution would create no propaganda problem in the village. Ever since his childhood as the village troublemaker, the boy had been unpopular in Lia.

Alexo Gatzoyiannis, who was at first a source of comfort to the other prisoners in the cellar prison, had long ago given up any hope of survival. To Eleni, her sister-in-law always seemed one of the strongest women in the
village, uncomplaining despite her difficult life and many children. During her testimony at the trial, Alexo blazed with defiance and cynicism, but the pain of torture eventually destroyed her mind. Those who saw her during the last days of her life say she seemed oblivious of her surroundings, her eyes blank, recognizing no one.

The gray-haired cooper Vasili Nikou, a veteran of nine years as a soldier in the Balkan wars, had drunk his life as a cup of gall. The horrors of his military service and the death of his only son had hardened him like a tree on a cliff, constantly battered by the elements. The torture did not destroy Nikou’s sanity nor shake his cynical despair. His daughter Chrysoula, who was twenty-eight at the time, saw him shortly after the trial. Although no other prisoner was permitted visits from their family, Chrysoula was allowed to bring him food, which she had to taste first to prove that it hadn’t been poisoned in order to end her father’s pain. At her request, the cooper was brought to the door of the cellar.

“His face was swollen and black around the eyes,” Chrysoula remembers, “and on one side his upper lip was puffed up. It must have hurt him to talk, because he spoke so slowly. We embraced, despite the lice crawling all over him, and he tried to put up a brave front. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘Jails are for men. Go home and look after your mother.’ ”

After this visit, Chrysoula and her younger sister Olga, accompanied by their aunt Fotina Makou, made a pilgrimage to the hills below Tsamanta where Major Spiro Skevis was based as commander of a battalion. They were hoping that they could convince Skevis to intercede with his superior officers on behalf of their father. Nikou’s other sister, who had been sent into Albania with the entire Skevis clan two months earlier, was married to Skevis’ eldest brother, Yiorgos, a tie of kinship that was not taken lightly in a village like Lia.