Eleni (27 page)

While the
andartes
were worrying about the security forces, Eleni was brooding over the silence from her husband. The international mails had resumed and many villagers in Lia had already heard from relatives in the United States, but there was not a word from Christos. The only explanation she could think of was that something had happened to him during the four years they were cut off from each other. The fear that he was dead grew in her and the old pain began to gnaw at her bowels as she tried to stretch the little food they had left. It had been hard enough to see the children becoming ragged and thin during the war, but now it was unbearable.

One day in late spring, as Eleni was picking lettuce in the small garden and thinking dully that there was nothing else for the evening meal, a fit of uncontrollable weeping seized her. From inside, Kanta heard her mother crying. She looked out the window to see Eleni ripping lettuce leaves out of the ground, tearing them to pieces like a madwoman, all the while screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead! Aiiee! He’s died and left us here!”

During the first months of the peace, the people of Greece still moved about the landscape like survivors of a holocaust; ragged, barefoot and close to starvation. The country was devastated by the years of occupation and the months of civil war; more than 100,000 homes had been destroyed, 500,000 Greeks had died of starvation or murder and the economy was bankrupt. The first promise of help appeared in the form of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) with shipments of charity food and clothing.

To administer the aid, UNRRA relied on regional government officials, who in turn appointed village committees composed of men they knew were anti-Communists. In Lia there were few rightists to choose from, but five were found, including three who had been imprisoned in the schoolhouse by ELAS: the cooper Vasili Nikou, the cripple Boukouvalas, and Kitso Haidis.

Every month a shipment of relief supplies was unloaded at Igoumenitsa, then carried overland to Filiates. The committee members from Lia would go there to sort the village’s allotment and then distribute it to their list of families. It was a hard eight-hour walk from Lia to collect the handouts, but the villagers would have walked any distance to receive the lifesaving monthly ration of 8 pounds of flour per person, a half pound of sugar, 6 ounces of rice, 6 ounces of lentils, two cans of evaporated milk per child, some powdered milk and eggs, and with luck, some canned goods. On rare but unforgettable occasions, there were even chocolates, cookies, tea and Camel cigarettes.

At first it seemed an honor to be chosen as a member of the UNRRA committee distributing the largess, and Kitso couldn’t help thinking that he might squirrel away an extra can or two of food for himself, but he quickly discovered that the problems of his new office far exceeded the honor. Within weeks of their appointment, the men on the committee became the most hated people in the village. Every person who came for their family’s ration confronted Kitso with sick children and ailing parents, and accusations that he had favored other villagers.

He always replied righteously, “Every person gets the same amount!” But no one believed him, and the hatred grew like a vine. As it increased, the whole village became convinced that Kitso’s basement must be a treasure house of filched UNRRA supplies, hidden away for himself and his daughters and grandchildren. The suspicions twined themselves around the families of all five UNRRA committee members and would eventually burst into deadly flower.

At the time of the first UNRRA distribution, in May of 1945, Kitso warned Eleni not to travel to Filiates with him nor to arrive too early for fear that he would be accused of giving her preference. She decided to make the long trek in the company of her sister-in-law, Foto Gatzoyiannis’ wife Alexo, and gave in to Kanta’s pleading to come along too.

With six children still in the house and her husband a haphazard provider at best, Alexo needed the UNRRA food even more desperately than Eleni did. Her unflagging good humor had endeared Alexo to Eleni long before she assisted at the birth of Nikola. They had laughed and cried in each other’s arms when they saw it was a boy, and by now Alexo seemed more like a sister to Eleni than a sister-in-law.

The two women set out down the mountain, traveling southwest through the ravines, quickly reaching the rolling foothills, which were heavy with the smell of spring. They each held a branch as a walking stick and moved with long, steady mountain strides. Thirteen-year-old Kanta meandered back and forth in their wake, picking dandelion puffs and blowing them to the winds. A cuckoo called and listened to its own echo, and the spice of the flowering quince trees filled the air.

Eleni’s mood was the opposite of the day. She dreaded their arrival in Filiates when she would have to stand in line to receive charity from strangers. Once she had been the giver of charity to poor families in her neighborhood.

She turned around to check on Kanta, who was walking barefoot on feet as hard as leather, wearing a brown dress of shiny wool cut from one of Eleni’s own. The patches on the elbows had worn through, and the scratchy fabric was thick with dandelion fuzz. Christos, always the dandy, would have been embarrassed to walk next to her, Eleni mused, but then, Christos was probably dead and would never know how low his family had sunk in the village.

The sunshine felt like a physical weight on Eleni’s shoulders as they hiked on, straggling into Filiates by midafternoon and finding their way to the distribution center, a former Turkish inn.

As the two women joined the long line outside the building, Kanta wandered about, staring at such marvels as the Turkish mosque in the central square and the great outdoor market. She joined a crowd around a couple dressed in the khaki UNRRA uniforms with the blue United Nations insignia on their shoulders. The woman was slim and blond with white eyelashes and reminded Kanta of pictures in the American magazines she had once dreamed over.

The couple distributed several boxes full of secondhand clothing to the clamoring crowd. Kanta edged closer, fascinated. The woman’s eyes lighted on her and she motioned Kanta to come forward. Then she reached into a carton of wadded-up clothes and searched until she pulled out a little-girl’s dress of bright blue with puffed red short sleeves. The woman folded the dress and thrust it into her hands with a little pat to show it was really hers.

Afraid she might have to give it back, the girl fled, running until she found a tiny shed half filled with hay. There she tore off her scratchy brown dress and put on the blue and red one. She ran her hands over her flat chest, feeling the fabric, then flung the old dress into the hay and ran to the town square to find her mother.

Eleni’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the new finery. Kanta stood straight, then turned right and left. “Do you like it?” she exclaimed. “A nice lady from UNRRA gave it to me. Free! To keep!”

Eleni looked at her daughter, wearing a charity dress that some other little girl had worn, probably in America, and then discarded. She flushed. “Where’s your own dress?” she snapped. “You can’t go back to the village like that! What will people think, a thirteen-year-old girl going around letting the world look at her bare arms?”

All morning and into the afternoon, the doors of the distribution office did not open, and the line did not move as Eleni, Alexo and Kanta sat in the hot sun. Kanta had put her brown dress back on, but the blue and red one was folded up small and hidden under her clothes. Eleni was leaning against her sister-in-law’s shoulder when she heard a man’s voice shouting her name.

She looked up to see her cousin, the same Costa Haidis who had refused to see her when she was trying to get her father released from the schoolhouse jail. Costa’s thin face was red with exertion, and there were large perspiration stains under the arms of his wrinkled suit. He stood panting in front of her. The proud commissar was gone and in his place was a man with a fugitive’s eyes and a false smile.

“Hello, Costa! I thought you’d gone to the mountains to hide with the Skevis men,” Eleni said.

“No one authorized them to hide!” he snapped. “The party’s policy is to
go and face the police, break their terror by confronting them. That’s what I did. They can’t jail all of us.”

“And they let you go?”

“The bastards slapped me around some, asked me questions, but finally they released me. The police can do whatever they want out here, but in Athens they have to be careful because other countries are watching. That’s why I’m going there.” He put his smile back in place. “Of course, I was planning to call on you in the village before I left. I thought you might have an old suit that Christos doesn’t need anymore.”

The sound of her husband’s name reminded Eleni of her fear. “I’ve lost him, Costa!” she cried. “Not a word since the mails opened. I’m certain he’s dead and nobody will tell me!”

Costa fumbled inside his coat, beaming. “But, cousin, that’s why I’ve been chasing you! I have such good news that your grandchildren will put flowers on my grave!”

He thrust toward her a packet of letters and postcards, a dozen at least, covered in the precise, old-fashioned script that Eleni knew so well. She looked from the extended hand to her cousin’s face, searching for an explanation, then whispered, “But why do
you
have them?”

He grinned. “When I got here, I told the postmaster to hold any letters for you so that I could take them back personally, to see your joy. But I just found out you’d come here instead.”

It took a moment for his words to register, then anger engulfed her and she leaped to her feet, snatching the packet out of his hands. She spat on his wing-tipped shoes. “You thought you could collect a reward!” she shouted. “Do you know how many years you’ve taken off my life?” Then she broke down, and Costa, embarrassed, scurried off as gap-toothed women stared after him.

There were fifteen letters in the packet, each bearing a strange return address. Christos wrote:

Christos was now living on an island called Staten, he told her, very near to New York City, cooking in a diner owned by the son-in-law of a Greek priest from Povla.

He had also sent a postcard, a dramatic black and white view of the Empire State Building, rising like the tallest taper in the church candelabra. Christos had inked in an arrow pointing to the observation terrace of the skyscraper and on the back of the card he had scrawled:

As she tore open his letters, Eleni became so agitated she couldn’t make sense of the dancing words and had to ask Kanta to read them to her. When she heard every line, she went to a nearby kiosk and bought a leaf of writing paper and a pencil. “Dear husband,” she began, sitting on the pavement, frowning in concentration.

She told him how badly they needed the money and any clothing he could send, and then, writing in a firmer hand, she told him to begin at once to arrange the papers for their immigration:

When Eleni and Kanta returned to Lia, the children fought to hold the photograph of the immense tower. Their father was alive and, they thought, living in this great spire. Nikola, nearly six, studied the photo, frowning and squinting, trying to make out the face of the father he had never seen in the pinhole windows next to the arrow. Olga fretted that he would certainly fall
to his death into the black canyons of the street. Kanta, the logical one, asked how people could gather enough wood in New York to heat all the skyscrapers when not one tree was visible in the photograph.

“Everything is easier in America,” Eleni explained. “Trucks bring black rocks—coal—and pour them into a great oven, like the one we use for the bread, in the basement of the towers, and pipes carry the fire’s steam up to every room and heat it.”

“Burning rocks!” Glykeria marveled. “I wouldn’t have to gather firewood! What an easy life!”

Nikola thought the America stories were better than fairy tales about warriors and princes and wolves. The one that impressed him most was the story of the swimming-pool rooms. “When it gets too hot or they feel dirty and want to go swimming,” Eleni said, “people jump into a pool as big as the whole room. Like the little irrigation dam up at the spring but thirty times bigger.”