Eleni (3 page)

Taki listened obsequiously to what the deputy said, and nodded. He promised to do whatever he could. I steered the former guerrilla to my
rented car, and once he was inside, began to drive aimlessly, leaving the city behind, meanwhile asking about where he spent the war. He was posted in the Mourgana village of Lia, Taki said.

Weren’t there five people from that village executed? I asked.

Taki frowned. Yes, he had been at the execution himself, he said, as one of the guards. No, not on the firing squad; that was made up of guerrillas stationed higher up the mountain who came down to the killing ground. Those executions were a very bad thing, he opined, shaking his head. One of those killed was an eighteen-year-old boy, one of their own guerrillas, who was charged with treason. After the execution, Taki said, he had personally filed a complaint with his commander about the boy’s murder.

Did he remember two women? I asked.

He thought for a moment. One was a woman with light-brown hair who had a home near the church at the western edge of the village, he recalled, a house with a mulberry tree nearby. That house had been used as the jail and he had been posted there as a guard. Taki was getting visibly uneasy, watching the deserted countryside flash by. “Was that woman related to you?” he asked.

I told him who she was. Taki became more agitated and suggested that we stop somewhere for coffee. He knew that in my car, on these lonely roads, he was in a vulnerable position. But once we stopped and he found himself in the security of a well-lit roadside café, he relaxed a little and described what he remembered of the executions. He was still trying to appear helpful. Clearly, he thought that I could use my influence with the deputy to bring his exiled sister back from Tashkent. He even promised to travel with me to Lia to the execution site, where he would try to remember more details. It was a promise that he would repeat several times but never keep. Every time I tried to get him to fix a date to go to the village he’d find some excuse to cancel it as the last moment, no doubt for fear of what might happen if we found ourselves alone in the isolated ravine where my mother died.

During several subsequent meetings with Taki in Yannina, I pumped him for the names of his guerrilla superiors and the men who served as judges at my mother’s trial. His memory was blurred and he could only give me the pseudonym of one of the judges—Yiorgos Economou—but, he added, it was another judge who was head of the court.

Taki was a repulsive little man who combined shallow cunning and false amiability, but I believed his account of the execution, as much as he remembered it; he was convincingly angry about the murders because they hurt the cause of Communism in the village and claimed one of his fellow guerrillas. In our last meeting, which took place in the nearly empty bar section of the lobby of Yannina’s largest hotel, I pressed Taki to remember details of the tortures that the prisoners had been subjected to during the twenty days he stood guard duty outside the jail in Lia. He admitted he had seen one of the woman prisoners being interrogated in the garden. It was
the woman with the light-chestnut hair, the owner of the house that was the jail, he said. While other guerrillas hit her, one of them held her shoulders and pressed his knee against her back.

I stared at him uncomprehendingly and asked him to repeat it. He went over it several times but I still looked blank. I didn’t understand how the guerrilla could hold her shoulders and put his knee on her back at the same time.

Taki and I were sitting side by side on a couch with a marble coffee table in front of us. Finally he stood up with a shrug and motioned for me to stand. After looking around to be sure no one was watching, with an apologetic smile he went behind me and seized my shoulders. Taki was several inches shorter than I was, a frail man of fifty-two whom I could easily overpower in a fight. From behind he grasped my arms just below the shoulders, then lifted his knee and placed it in the small of my back. Then he twisted my arms back at an angle that threatened to dislocate them from the sockets and pushed with his knee against the curve of my spine. He didn’t apply much pressure; it was only a friendly demonstration.

I felt myself in a position that left me totally helpless. The inability to move, coupled with the pressure on the fragile vertebrae of the spine, was the surprising thing. I pictured my backbone snapping like that of a fish on a plate. A startling pain, considering the lack of force, shot up across my shoulders into the base of my skull.

With a nervous chuckle Taki released me and sat down again. He continued talking, but I didn’t hear anything he said. I was perspiring and there was a roaring inside my head. That one flash of pain had left me weak as a child, not because of the pain itself, but because I had suddenly imagined it magnified many times over, heightened by fear and being done to my mother. For an instant I had felt a tiny fraction of the suffering she experienced, day after day, increasing in viciousness until she was killed.

The reality of the pain washed my mind clear of illusion. In that split second, in the hotel lobby in Yannina, I realized what I hadn’t yet admitted to myself: it wasn’t enough to find out the details of her torments. The only way I could live with that knowledge and find some sort of relief was to exact payment in kind for the agony she had gone through. That day was the first time I understood that my search for my mother’s killers would not end when I wrote her story. I had to go a step further and make them suffer the way they hurt her.

Face to face for the first time with the need for revenge which possessed me, I had a quick image of smashing Taki’s smiling face open on the marble table before us, but I sat there, forcing myself not to move as he talked on. Taki was not the proper object of my rage; he was a nonentity, only a bit player in my mother’s murder. Besides, a fistfight in a hotel lobby would spoil any hope I had of finding the rightful target, the person whose hands were stained with her blood.

I didn’t meet with Taki again. The sight of him turned my stomach, and
he had told me everything he knew about the judges. I would have to uncover the rest by other means. So before I left Yannina I stopped at the small apartment of a woman named Dina Venetis. She is one of the few prisoners held captive in the cellar jail in Lia who survived to tell what went on there. Dina had been on trial with my mother but she was exonerated and set free. I wanted to find out what she remembered of the judges.

Dina is now an unremarkable matron with grizzled short hair, and a kindly smile revealing three gold teeth, but once she was a beauty. Photographs taken before the war show a dark, sultry-looking young woman in a black kerchief, with a full mouth, high cheekbones and black-fringed eyes staring solemnly at the camera. When the guerrillas arrested her, leaving her three small children unprotected in the house, her husband was somewhere in the south, fighting on the side of the Greek government forces.

Dina welcomed me hospitably into her stuffy apartment, crowded with memorabilia of her children, including the small son taken from her by the guerrillas and sent to a camp in Russia for seven years. She shook her head when I asked her about the judge called Yiorgos Economou; the only judge who had made an impression on her at the trial was the man who conducted it, a man with a voice so deep and terrifying that “when he spoke you thought you were hearing Death himself.” He was the man the villagers knew as Katis.

The name “Katis” struck me like a blow, although I had heard it many times before.
Katis
is simply an Albanian word that means “judge,” but it was the pseudonym of a man whom many villagers had described to me. He worked for the judicial branch of the guerrillas and assembled evidence against defendants at trials. He conducted interrogations and orchestrated the tortures. He was universally remembered as the chief judge at my mother’s trial. I had often heard the name “Katis” from my sister Glykeria, the only one of us who was left behind when the rest escaped the village. On the last day of my mother’s life, my fourteen-year-old sister was allowed to see her while Katis stood by watching. Glykeria said that my mother took him aside and whispered to him, pleading that the girl be spared. If I were to find my mother’s killers, I had to find Katis, but first I had to learn his real name.

Dina was vague on the details of the trial, saying that she was too frightened to remember, but she vividly recalled her imprisonment in the cellar and was perfectly willing to describe it to me, sometimes smiling and shaking her head over an anecdote as if unconscious of the tears that she kept wiping away.

The prisoners, covered with lice, their hands tied behind their backs, were so crowded into our cellar that they had to sleep in a sitting position, she said. For some reason my aunt Alexo was left untied, perhaps because of her age, and she moved among the others, massaging their hands and rocking their bodies to keep them from going numb.

I was disturbed when Dina said that my mother was not kept with the
others in the basement while she was there. “There were other rooms in your house where they might have kept her,” she suggested. I wondered why my mother was singled out for special treatment, kept isolated from the rest.

Dina told me many details about the prison that were painful to hear, but one story that made a deep impression on me was that of a tall woman with curly black hair from the village of Mavronoron, whose name was Despo—that’s all she knew of her—a nervous girl who cried all the time for her two children. “Despo couldn’t stand the beatings,” Dina said. “One night she found a large nail stuck in one of the beams, pulled it out and plunged it into her stomach, trying to kill herself. Drove it deep, poor thing, but she couldn’t die. Afterward she begged constantly for something to help the pain, but they wouldn’t give her anything.”

She told how Despo was taken upstairs one night, a signal that she was about to be executed. “You’re going to kill me! I know it!” the other prisoners heard her screaming. Then they heard Katis reply in his sonorous voice, “How can you think that? Would we kill Despo, our pampered one, our favorite?” After that the prisoners never saw Despo again.

I left Yannina discouraged, knowing scarcely more than when I had arrived. All I had was the pseudonyms of two judges—Economou and Katis. But back in Athens, by hounding sources in the Ministry of Public Order, I managed to uncover one solid lead: the real name of Yiorgos Economou was Yiorgos Anagnostakis, a lawyer who had returned from exile in Tashkent in 1975 and was now living not far from me in Athens. As for Katis, there was nothing in the files. “You’ll have to get his real name,” I was told.

Before my search was over I would encounter several coincidences so unlikely as to seem invented. The first one happened on a February afternoon when I arrived outside the modern apartment building where the former judge Anagnostakis lived, to see a black, glass-enclosed 1950’s Cadillac hearse parked at the door. I asked an old man outside the entrance, perhaps the concierge, if the lawyer Yiorgos Anagnostakis lived inside. He raised his eyebrows and protruded his lower lip in the gesture Greeks use to indicate the fickleness of fate. “His body is inside, yes,” he replied, “but his soul has flown.” On the day I went looking for him, the judge Anagnostakis had died of a heart attack.

I left the building in despair. A malevolent fate had snatched one of my mother’s judges out of my grasp and I was now at a dead end, with my only clue the useless nickname Katis.

Eventually I tracked down several former guerrillas who claimed to have heard of Katis, the judge, but most of them told me they thought he had died in exile. The closest thing I could get to a lead was the comment of one ex-guerrilla that a certain retired lawyer living in northern Greece might have known Katis during the war because the man had served in a similar position as a judge at guerrilla headquarters in the Grammos mountains.
The lawyer’s name was Demitris Gastis, and he was currently recuperating from a heart attack in his native village of Dilofo just north of Yannina.

With little optimism I flew to Yannina again and drove to the village of Dilofo, hidden among the foothills of the Zagoria mountains. The inquisitive woman who sat outside her doorway at the entrance to the village was happy to lead me to the imposing stone mansion of the lawyer Gastis and rouse the ancient crone in the servants’ quarters who woke him from his siesta.

I knew that Demitris Gastis, as judge for the Eleventh Division of the guerrilla army in the Grammos mountains, had sentenced many to the firing squad, but if I expected him to look like a killer, I found instead a debonair figure of gracefully aging urbanity with a neatly trimmed mustache, square horn-rimmed glasses and wavy salt-and-pepper hair. Dressed in slippers and a fashionable Italian jersey and slacks, he ushered me into the cool depths of his house, where pillowed banquettes lined the hand-decorated walls. Coffee and a box of chocolates appeared in honor of the visitor.

While I explained that I was a Greek-American journalist researching a book about the civil war, the former judge listened intently, then smiled and became expansive. He prided himself on his erudition and suggested a long list of reference books that I should consult, but I assured him that I had read them all. Convinced that I had an adequate background knowledge, he began to describe the workings of the military trials he had conducted. “We let a prisoner speak in his own defense for as long as he wanted,” he said, “and permitted anyone who wished to stand up and speak for him, something that even the civil courts today don’t do.”

In response to my questions Gastis calmly stated that he had sent only two men to their deaths; then, later, he contradicted himself and mentioned a third—a guerrilla executed for raping a girl—whose dead body was sent on horseback through the occupied villages to dramatize that the Communists didn’t tolerate mistreatment of women. I did not bother to dispute Gastis’ body count because I was eager to get him on the subject of trials in my own area, the Mourgana mountains.