Eleni (84 page)

Christos Gatzoyiannis described the scene in English twenty-five years later, when he was eighty-one years old: “I was on the dock watching the boat. Olga recognize me. And I waved to them. Prokopi Koulisis, he picked Nikola up and showed him to me from the deck. First time I see my son. Oh my tears! My heart broke that minute.”

The old man paused, trying to collect himself while two small grandchildren played around his feet. “They start to come out,” he went on doggedly. “I hugged him, his little arms. They was so cold! My own childrens!” He turned apologetically toward the machine that was recording his words. “I think I have to stop now, because I’m going to cry.”

Nikola was less moved by his first sight of his father, who was smaller than the patriarch he had always imagined. The boy stood awkwardly apart from the tearful reunion of Christos with his daughters, then he wandered over to the side of the pier, examining the steely depths of the water far below. He heard someone snap at him: “Get away from there! What do you think you’re doing?” Nikola reflected that he didn’t even know this man and he was already ordering him around in a threatening voice.

But when he saw the rented automobile that would drive them to their new home in Massachusetts, Nikola began to be impressed by the wealth and importance of his father. And when they stopped somewhere along the way to buy gasoline and he heard Christos speak to the attendant, he decided his father must be a man of exceptional intelligence to have mastered this harsh-sounding foreign tongue.

A tentative spring was pushing buds up through the snow of the Vitsi mountains when Glykeria reached the front lines. The guerrillas had taken away her mother’s brown dress and given her a baggy uniform along with cleated boots to cover her bare feet. She was assigned guard duty shortly after her arrival and remembers hearing the unexpected notes of a hymn wafting through the air from the direction of the government emplacements to the south. It was the triumphal Easter psalm, “Christ Is Risen.” She
peered through her field glasses and saw the soldiers in their foxholes cracking red eggs together to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Although she prided herself on her toughness, her eyes filled at the thought that somewhere her sisters were enjoying the familiar rituals of the Easter season without her.

Glykeria quickly demonstrated that she was hopeless as a fighter. She fell asleep on guard duty, handed over her gun to a fellow guerrilla even though it was a capital offense, and ran screaming for cover every time the soldiers began to strafe their positions. When a friend of hers from Babouri, a girl named Athena Langa, was cut in half by machine-gun fire, Glykeria cried for days and refused to take up her gun. It was finally decided to make her a telephone operator so she could work at the switchboard in the relative safety of an underground bunker. She soon became adept at handling the calls from the field, working with three other
andartinas
in the subterranean room. By night they laid the telephone cables in the ground, deep enough so that the bombs would not sever them, and fortified them with land mines.

The sight of the government soldiers so near inspired Glykeria with the ambition to cross over to the other side. She knew, however, that she would be in mortal danger from both armies, for many
andartinas
had tried to infiltrate the government lines and the soldiers were deeply suspicious.

The Gatzoyiannis family in Massachusetts learned that the villagers evacuated from Lia were taken to Shkodra. One day Glykeria received a letter that had been sent to the barracks there and forwarded to her after being opened by the guerrilla censors. It was from Olga and inside was a photograph of her family standing in front of their new house in Worcester. Olga wrote that they were praying every day for Glykeria to escape and join them in America. After studying the photograph, she carefully folded the letter around it and put it in the pocket of her uniform.

A few days later Glykeria was called to guerrilla headquarters and confronted by a short, swarthy lieutenant who informed her that an examination of her records showed she was below the age to be conscripted and that she was free to return to the barracks in Albania at once. She stood there blinking, thinking that if she left, she would be losing her only chance to escape. Trying to sound convincing, she protested that she was determined to fight for the revolution. The lieutenant eyed her suspiciously. “Your mother was executed and you say you’re loyal to us?” he asked. Glykeria retorted that she was a true Communist and that was why her family had abandoned her. The officer listened skeptically. “I’ll look into your background and decide what to do,” he said.

Glykeria lay awake that night certain that her only hope of escaping was about to be snatched away. The next morning she and another girl were ordered to prepare graves for two guerrillas who had stepped on a mine and died in the night. They reached the spot where the mangled bodies lay, and Glykeria almost cried out in relief when she recognized one of them as the dark lieutenant who had called her in the day before. She gave the corpse
a sharp kick with her cleated boots and spat into the powder-blackened face, “You piece of shit!” Then the girl, not five feet tall, began dragging the heavy body toward the grave.

Glykeria quickly became hardened to sights that would have sent Kanta into a nervous faint. During the times she left the bunker to drink water from a nearby spring, Glykeria only stared curiously when she passed a severed leg, blackish-yellow and hairy, crawling with fat white worms; she closely examined a decapitated head, its swollen tongue protruding from the gaping mouth. During the height of a battle she once found a stream running red with blood from the bodies clogging it higher up the mountain. “But I was so thirsty, I drank the water, blood and all,” she says now, laughing at her callousness.

Vitsi, where Glykeria was based, was the best fortified of the two remaining DAG strongholds, with 8,000 guerrillas. Grammos, to the west, had only 5,000. On August 2 the Greek army began a diversionary attack on Grammos with heavy artillery shelling and aerial bombardment. As expected, the guerrilla command rushed all reserves to the battlefront. Eight days later the nationalist artillery suddenly turned around and attacked Vitsi to the east, hitting the unprepared insurgents from five different points. The guerrillas fought with the strength of desperation, knowing that after three years of struggle everything depended on the outcome of this battle, but the government soldiers, particularly the expert LOK commandos, made deep penetrations into their lines. By the time the DAG gave up and ran in confusion toward Albania, there were 997 guerrilla corpses rotting on the mountainsides of Vitsi.

Glykeria was working in the underground bunker with one other telephone operator on August 10 when the nationalist forces turned their attention from Grammos toward Vitsi. Over the static of her earphones she heard the downpour of artillery shells and bombs outside and knew that the soldiers were approaching. Suddenly the telephones in the guerrillas’ front lines, which had fallen silent more than an hour before, crackled into life. A strange male voice asked, “Who is this?”

“What is the password?” Glykeria replied automatically as she had been taught.

There was a pause. “I don’t know,” said the voice.

Glykeria held her breath and glanced around, but the girl working with her, Marika, was busy speaking into her mouthpiece. Glykeria thought for a moment. She was almost certain that the voice on the other end was a soldier, not a guerrilla trying to trick her. She could visualize exactly where he was standing; she had placed the cables there herself.

“Listen carefully,” she whispered, keeping one eye on Marika. She described where the guerrilla officers were based and where the underground pillboxes were concealed, directing the enemy fire against her own comrades. As soon as the mortars began to hit home, ever closer to her own position, an
andarte
rushed into the bunker and told the operators to
retreat. He handed Glykeria two of the heavy yellow suitcaselike telephones to carry.

The two girls emerged into a night illuminated by the red glow of bullets whizzing past their heads. They tried to dodge and run uphill in the direction the guerrillas had gone, Glykeria staggering under the weight of the telephones. She had been told that in battle, combatants may not realize they’ve been hit by a bullet even as their life’s blood flows out, and she kept setting down the phones and running her hands over her body to check for wounds.

When the two girls reached a spot where they could look back, they saw that the government troops were almost upon them. Glykeria seized Marika’s arm. “Let’s give ourselves up!” she whispered.

The older girl stared at her in the flickering light, then reached for the rifle slung over her shoulder. “Are you suggesting that we betray our comrades?” she exclaimed, leveling the gun at Glykeria’s chest. The two girls stood, frozen in indecision as Glykeria waited for the bullet to tear into her. Then an artillery shell screamed close over their heads and Marika turned and disappeared into the shadows.

Glykeria left the telephones and ran, tumbling into a deep ravine nearby. She curled up behind a rock, making her body as small as possible. Shivering in the darkness, she thought she could hear the harsh breathing of others around her, but there was no movement.

Glykeria cowered behind the rock for a long time, not daring to look up, when she heard the sound of running feet. Then she heard a voice saying, “This way, lieutenant, sir.” She knew that if it had been a Communist, he would have said “Comrade Lieutenant” instead of “sir.” Cautiously she peered over her rock and saw the silhouette of a man wearing a round, flat cap with a feather on it—the uniform of a nationalist commando. He flinched as she jumped into his path, waving the photograph of her family in one hand and screaming, “Mr. Lieutenant, I give up! The Communists killed my mother! My father’s in America! I’m with you!”

As the soldiers came forward to take a close look at her, Glykeria suddenly heard cries from all over the ravine: “I surrender!”—the voices of her fellow
andartinas
who had fallen behind in the retreat.

The soldiers roughly herded the prisoners back toward their camp, where they were collected into a barbed-wire enclosure. Glykeria sat near a Macedonian peasant woman with a cradle strapped to her back. The
andartinas
watched nervously as a wounded soldier lying nearby, blood pouring from his mouth and nose, struggled to reach his rifle, shouting, “Let me shoot them all! I’m dying and these are the women who killed me!”

By the light of dawn the guarded prisoners could see a spectacular view of the battle above them as the soldiers drove the guerrillas up the corpse-littered peaks. The number of prisoners in the compound grew and Glykeria trembled as she saw soldiers beat captured
andartinas
with their gun butts because the women would not speak Greek, only their Macedonian dialect.
Their captors took this as proof that they were loyal to the Communists, who had promised to create a separate Macedonian state in northern Greece.

Glykeria saw a mounted figure of terrifying splendor plowing through the crowd of prisoners toward her, a Greek officer in the uniform of a colonel, a gaunt, sunburned man in his mid-fifties with a brush mustache and glasses. He pulled up his white horse directly in front of the girl, probably singling her out because her fair hair, ruddy skin and wide forehead among the darker faces around her reminded him of his home province.

He examined the child in the guerrilla uniform and said, “Hello, little one. Are you from Epiros?” He introduced himself as Colonel Constantinides from Vrosina, a village only fifteen miles from Lia on the Kalamas River. When he learned that Glykeria was from Lia, the colonel asked her if she knew Kitso Haidis. “He’s my grandfather!” she exclaimed.

The officer smiled. “I’ve slept in his house,” he said. After asking her more about her family he said, “Wait here until I come back. I’m going to get you out of this place.” He returned within the hour and took her to the headquarters tent, where she was told to sign some papers and was questioned about the positions and fortifications of the guerrillas. A soldier with a small camera snapped a picture of the uniformed girl, solemnly pointing out to the colonel and other soldiers the mountains from which she had come.

Colonel Constantinides told her that he had arranged for her to go to the detention center in Kastoria where she’d be treated more humanely than the prisoners suspected of Communist loyalties, who would be sent to Kozani. “I know a man from your village who owns several stores in Kastoria,” he said. “He’s a pillar of the town and can arrange things that others can’t. I’ll have him get you out of the detention camp and look after you. His name’s Christos Tatsis. Do you know him?”

Glykeria eagerly lied to the colonel, saying that she did, and he succeeded in having her sent to the prison camp near Kastoria. Christos Tatsis, a tall, graying man with a large nose and a good-natured grin, came to visit the girl several times, but it took two weeks before he could convince the military authorities to release her into his custody.

On the rainy day she emerged from the iron gates of the camp, Glykeria was driven to the police station in town to sign more papers denying any Communist affiliation. Then the shopowner gallantly held out his umbrella to shelter the girl for the short walk to his home, but Glykeria, painfully aware of the figure she made in her filthy uniform and oversized boots, her hair matted and tangled, her whole body covered with red welts from her infestation of lice, refused. “Please, Mr. Tatsis, let me walk behind you,” she begged, “so that nobody will guess that you know me.”

The shopowner set about transforming the ragged little guerrilla with the help of his elderly mother and his sister. They burned her uniform, bought her new dresses and cut off her long braids, which were too tangled to comb.
Every day the sister bathed her in a large wooden trough and applied a homemade ointment to the red welts. They fed her until her face resumed its former roundness. Finally Christos Tatsis sent a telegram to his cousin Leo Tatsis, who owned a wholesale grocery business in Worcester, Massachusetts, and would know how to get in touch with Christos Gatzoyiannis.