Eleni (82 page)

As Costas Gatzoyiannis watched from a distance, Foto and Kitso pulled away more boulders. Next to Nikou lay Spiro Michopoulos, then his nephew Andreas; finally they found Eleni and Alexo Gatzoyiannis. The bodies were all face down, bound together with wire. The men recognized Eleni by her light-chestnut hair, which still shone with glints of red and gold in the sunlight. Foto identified Alexo by the black homespun skirt and a small patch she had sewn to cover a hole in the back of her black sweater. Foto’s cheeks were wet with tears, but he had lost another wife in his youth and had learned to keep tragedy at arm’s length. His son Costas lacked his objectivity. At the sight of his mother’s body the boy began to scream that he would put on a uniform and pay for her death with the blood of every Communist guerrilla. His lust for vengeance ultimately cost him his life. Costas enlisted in the army as soon as he left the village and fought with suicidal recklessness. Five months after his mother’s death, as he stood in an exposed spot shouting curses at the guerrillas, he was killed by a bullet fired by a young
andartina
.

Kitso Haidis was shaken by racking sobs as he stood over the corpse of his daughter. The sight of the broken body beneath the mass of burnished hair released all the tears he had never shed for his other four daughters, dead in their doll-sized coffins. He grieved for them and for this favorite child, whom he had abandoned in anger without ever saying goodbye.

There was no way the dead could be moved. The men built a small retaining wall of stones and mud below the grave site so that the stream would not wash away the ground; then they removed the boulders and covered the bodies with dirt.

The sun warmed the newly turned earth, and insects and birds filled the ravine with sound as the men shouldered their tools and set out back toward the village. Kitso dreaded the ordeal ahead of him—telling his grandchildren what had happened to their mother.

Two days after the liberation of Lia, a refugee arrived in Igoumenitsa with a message for the Gatzoyiannis children that their grandfather would be returning that afternoon from the village. Olga and Kanta anxiously put chairs out on the small cement balcony so that they could see him the moment he stepped off the army truck.

Nikola paced nervously. To distract him, his uncle Andreas took the boy out to the wooded spot, his “thinking place,” and drew a chalk checkerboard on a flat tree stump there. Using black and white pebbles, Andreas set about teaching him to play checkers. But Nikola could not concentrate on the game, and as the shadows lengthened, he made excuses and left. He went to sit in the dust beside the road on the edge of town waiting for the first glimpse of his grandfather. His chest hurt and there was a tightness, like unswallowed food in his throat.

It was late afternoon when one of the canvas-topped army trucks roared past me, stirring up clouds of dust, and I glimpsed my grandfather’s shock of white hair in the back. I shouted and began to run after the lumbering vehicle, nearly catching up, when I saw my grandfather turn his face away from me, a week’s growth of beard making him look old and ill.
“Papou!”
I called as the truck picked up speed, entering the long shady avenue roofed with plane trees. The dust and exhaust stung my lungs as I hurtled into the tunnel of shade, tears of frustration dimming my sight. As I emerged into the sunlight where passengers were climbing out of the parked truck, I spied my grandfather walking away from me. Staggering, trying to catch my breath, I reached him and seized his arm. “What is it,
Papou?”
I asked. “Where’s
Mana?”

He looked away, new furrows of pain inscribed on his forehead. He gazed up at the unfinished house on the hillside, then reached into his pocket and pulled out two 100 drachma notes. “Take this, go down to the harbor and buy sweets,” he said in a choked voice. “Buy
reveni
, enough for many people.” Then he walked off, leaving me standing in the dust, clutching the money, staring after him.

The sun impaled me to the spot as a hollow ballooned inside me. He had told me in the only way he could. I had never seen my grandfather part with money for a frivolous reason. Those two wilted
100
drachma notes were to buy sweets to serve the mourners who would come to our door with condolences. I tried to believe that I was mistaken; perhaps the sweets were for a celebration. But his face had told me otherwise.

I ran at top speed to the pastry shop and my hands trembled as I waited for the huge white cardboard box to be filled and elaborately tied with a golden ribbon. I grasped it by the knot and sprinted toward our house. As I came near, a wave of sound rushed out, draining the last strength from my legs. It was a cry of despair, a sinuous, rising and falling chorus of pain, the funeral laments of my sisters. The box became too heavy and fell from my hand into the dirt. I couldn’t deceive myself any longer. The sound of their grief knotted my stomach and I ran, not knowing where I was going, until I hurled myself on the cool grass near the tree stump with the checkerboard. I pressed my face into the musk-smelling earth and clapped my hands over my ears, trying to shut out the awful screams that were the death knell of my mother.

Olga and Kanta were standing on the balcony watching the stooped figure of their grandfather climb the hill. They both realized at the same moment that he had grown a stubble of beard, the sign of mourning for a death in the family. They reached for each other’s hands and Olga said in a tight voice, “Perhaps he didn’t have a razor in the village.” When he entered the door, they both ran toward him shouting, “What happened to
Mana?”

Kitso looked at them wearily. “They’ve taken Glykeria into Albania,” he said in a toneless voice. “But she’s all right.”

“Never mind Glykeria!” snapped Kanta. “What about
Mana?”

The old man looked out toward the sea, which shone like a sheet of hammered gold under the setting sun. He couldn’t say the words. “Glykeria’s alive. They didn’t hurt her.” he said. Then they understood.

Olga rushed out on the shaky spiral staircase and vomited over the railing. Kanta seized an icon of the Virgin framed in glass from the mantelpiece and smashed it on the floor, stamping on it with her feet and screaming, “You could have saved her but you didn’t!”

At the sound of the uproar, two refugee women who lived on the other side of the house hurried in. They understood at once what had happened. One saw Fotini, pale and wide-eyed, backed in a corner. She picked up the girl, crooning, “My poor child!” But Fotini turned into a fury, kicked and bit the woman, who dropped her, startled. Then Fotini ran out of the room, down the staircase and into the shadows, taking refuge in the foul-smelling ditch that served as a latrine. After a while, when the stench became unbearable, she crept back into the house, now crowded with what seemed to be the whole population of Igoumenitsa. Many of the refugee women, long prepared for this moment, had already baked cakes and sweets as condolence gifts. One of them offered a piece of baklava to the little girl. She dried her tears on her sleeve and with the first bite, the awful pain of her mother’s death began to lift.

Nitsa’s voice still hadn’t returned to normal, but she added her hoarse wails to the general confusion. Andreas didn’t say a word through it all, but as the twilight faded, he looked around the room and asked, “Where’s the boy?” No one replied.

I had been lying in the grass for a long time when I realized that someone else was there. I looked up and saw my uncle seated on the edge of the large stump with the checkerboard. He beckoned and said softly, “We never finished our game.” I nodded and came to sit opposite him, but the checkerboard swam in front of me. Wordlessly I shook my head. Then he gathered me in his wiry arms and carried me as if I were a baby back up to the house. The room was suffocatingly close with crowded bodies, sympathetic murmuring, wails and sobs and the odor of cooked food. As Andreas carried me into the room, everyone fell silent, looking at me. Out of the corner of my eye I could
see a neighbor woman at the fireplace leaning over a bubbling vat of black dye and carefully dropping in my sisters’ bright-colored clothes.

Christos Gatzoyiannis received the news of his wife’s death in a letter sent to the room he rented on Front Street in Worcester for $8 a week. When he saw the name “Gatzoyiannis” on the back he thought for a moment that, after two years of silence, Eleni had somehow managed to get a letter out to him. A closer look showed that the envelope had been mailed from Athens by Yianni Gatzoyiannis, the eldest son of Alexo. When Christos opened it, a tiny newspaper clipping fell out. It was from the Greek paper
Kathimerini
, dated September 5, 1948:

The bit of newsprint fell to the floor as Christos unfolded the letter from his nephew. It stated in a few words that the condemned had been executed. “I was all alone and when I read that I got crazy,” Christos recalled twenty-six years later. “‘Killed my wife?’ I cried. ‘For what? Why?’

“The people from the restaurant came around to see me and I said I wasn’t going to work for a week. I stayed home, mourning my wife, writing letters everywhere, trying to find out the details, but there were no answers. I had no one.”

In Leshinitsa, just over the Albanian border, Glykeria was still struggling under the weight of Stavroula Yakou’s possessions. When she pleaded exhaustion, Stavroula pointedly reminded her that she was in a Communist country now, and without a powerful friend to protect her, her chances of survival were small.

The Greek exiles at Leshinitsa were divided into groups of ten and sent on foot to Delvino, fifteen miles away, where they were met by a lumbering convoy of battered army vehicles which stretched for miles into the distance,
ferrying the refugees to Aghies Sarantes, twenty miles farther west on the coast. The port was choked with displaced families from all over northern Greece who were to be sent by ship to northern Albania, far from the reach of the Greek army. The Liotes waited for two days, sleeping in a mosque, until room was found for them on one of the flat-bottomed barges. It was in Aghies Sarantes that women from Lia happened on a group of children headed for Rumania with the
pedomasoma
. Among them were some of those who had been taken from Lia only days before.

Dina Venetis began frantically searching for her son Vangeli. She found him in a large barnlike structure where Albanian women were stripping the children and boiling their clothes to kill the lice. Vangeli blushed at having his mother and other women see him naked. He hung his head and Dina saw that it, too, was covered with lice. She borrowed a pair of scissors from another woman and began to clip the boy’s hair down to the scalp, but she cropped only half of it before he was summoned by one of the guards and pulled out of her grasp to collect his wet clothing. She would not see Vangeli again for seven years.

After two days the villagers were driven onto barges for the two-day trip up the Adriatic coast to the port of St. John (or “Shengjin” in Albanian) and then inland to Shkodra. They were crammed together, 250 to a boat, unable to move. For peasants who had never seen the sea, the journey seemed like the ride to Hades on Charon’s raft. The overladen barge yawed and rocked on the stony surface of the water as women and children screamed and became seasick. Soon the deck was awash with urine and vomit. Glykeria squawked in protest as one neighbor threw up right in her lap. Vangelina Gatzoyiannis recalls that an old woman urinated on a small sack of dry porridge that she had managed to carry with her. Later, when her children began to starve in Shkodra, Vangelina cooked it and fed it to them anyway.

Athena Stratis, the third daughter of Alexo Gatzoyiannis, was sitting near Glykeria trying to hold on to her four small children. Certain that they would tumble over the low sides, she cried, “Help me, Glykeria! Take one of the children! They’re going to die!”

“I’m dying myself!” Glykeria moaned, holding her stomach. But that night, when Alexo’s daughter Niki pushed her way to the side to vomit, the little girl fainted and nearly slipped into the black water. Glykeria reached out and caught her by the back of her dress, saving her life.

When they disembarked at St. John, trucks took the refugees twenty miles north, to the city of Shkodra on the bank of Lake Skutari, which extends into Yugoslavia. The exhausted peasants were deposited before a two-story dilapidated barracks which had been used as stables. “This is where you’re going to live,” they were told by guerrillas. “You’d better start cleaning it out, because you’re sleeping here tonight.”

Glykeria gagged as they began shoveling out the manure that had accumulated on the two floors of tiny cubicles around a large central hall.
That night she slept in one of the stalls along with fifteen other people from her village, including her cousin Athena and Tassina Bartzokis and their six children. She had nothing to sleep on; Stavroula had disappeared with her blankets, but Tassina put the girl under a rug with her three babies.

Glykeria lived in the barracks in Shkodra for six months. The daily ration of food was one scoop of beans and a piece of rock-hard bread for each person. The refugees spent the daylight hours searching the surrounding area for pieces of firewood and wild greens that they might eat, and washing their lice-infested clothing in the lake. Glykeria had never been so hungry in her life. There was an old woman named Nikolena Fanayea in the same cubicle who was dying of a cancer that blocked her throat. She couldn’t swallow the crusts of bread, only the center, so Glykeria would beg from her the soggy, chewed remnants, and if any of Tassina’s babies didn’t finish its bread, she would snatch the crust out of the child’s hand before its mother noticed.