Eleni (80 page)

A
S THE FIRST DAYLIGHT
pierced the darkness of the ravine below the Chapel of St. Nicholas and illuminated trails of dried blood leading to a pile of rocks by the stream, Glykeria was still lying on the pallet in the Haidis house, holding her mother’s brown dress in her arms. She was awakened by a knock on the door and opened it to see a middle-aged guerrilla with a dirt-stained beard and eyes narrow with apprehension.

“You mustn’t blame me for bringing you this news,” he said, glancing nervously around the empty house and then back at the small blond girl in the red dress. “Yesterday afternoon we executed your mother. I fired one of the shots myself.” Taking a breath, he hurried on, “It wasn’t right to kill her, but we had no choice! We were under orders. It was your own villagers who betrayed her.”

Glykeria put her hands over her ears, trying to block out his words. Then she fell to her knees, reaching for the brown dress. She began to scream
“Mana! Mana!,”
a sound so full of pain that the neighbors closed their shutters and avoided one another’s eyes. The guerrilla moved a step closer. “Now you have to come up to the security police station to answer questions,” he said. “They sent me to bring you.”

Choking on her sobs, Glykeria pleaded that she couldn’t walk, but the guerrilla took her by the arm and pulled her up. Eleni’s dress fell from her lap to the floor.

The girl cried aloud all the way up to the Perivoli, and the few village women they passed averted their faces and scurried out of her way. She was led into the small tin-roofed storage room, where Sotiris Drapetis was waiting for her. He asked where her mother and grandfather had hidden valuables, but she cried that she didn’t know; how could she? She had been away at the harvest for the past three months. Sotiris frowned but he didn’t hit her, only warned her to think carefully; he would call her back until she was ready to cooperate. When she was dismissed, Glykeria hurried out the front door and saw a grotesque face peering at her from the kitchen window,
swollen and black from blows. It was Spiros Migdalis, a tinker from Babouri who had been caught when he sneaked back from Filiates, hoping to lead his wife and children to the nationalist side. Glykeria saw his tall wife standing behind him, also badly beaten.

The girl hurried out the gate and down the familiar path as the reality of her mother’s death pressed in on her like a suffocating weight. When she reached the Church of St. Demetrios, now being used as the stable, she looked up at the brightly painted icon of the saint on horseback set in a niche beside the door. She stared at the saint, as real to her as any neighbor in the Perivoli, and anger bubbled up in her chest. Raising a small fist, she began to scream, “Damn you, St. Demetrios! Don’t you see what they’ve done? Why don’t you strike them down? Why don’t you blind them, tear out their eyes?”

She heard a stirring behind her and spun around to see a man in guerrilla uniform who had been feeding his horse in the churchyard. It was Antonis, the aide of Colonel Petritis who had lived in their house and worried over Nikola because the boy reminded him of his own son. He came toward her, his head bent to hide the tears in his eyes. “I know what’s happened, child,” he said quietly, “but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Your mother was a good woman who never harmed anyone.” Then he walked away, leading the horse.

When she entered the Haidis gate, Glykeria was approached by two of the family’s small goats who had been left free and were scavenging in the bean field below. One had been nicknamed “Orphana” by the children because it was an orphan, and the other was called “Skoulerikia” because the two dewlaps of flesh hanging from its ears looked like earrings. The kids nuzzled her, crying plaintively for her to feed them; the sight of their mournful gold-irised eyes fed her anger. She shoved them away, crying, “We’re all orphans now and you can die for all I care! We’re all going to die!”

The only woman in the village brave enough to speak to Glykeria was the feeble-minded shepherdess, Vasilo Barka, who had long been the butt of Glykeria’s cruel teasing. Drawn by the bleating of the hungry kids, she came to Glykeria’s door and offered with tears in her eyes to care for the animals for free. “It’s the only thing I can do,” she cried, hugging the girl. “Your mother was like one of my family.” Remembering the many times her mother had scolded her for baiting the unfortunate woman, Glykeria hung her head as she mumbled a few words of thanks.

Later that day, as Glykeria wandered the fields, looking for something to eat, neighbors like Tassina Bartzokis and even relatives like Kitchina Stratis, her mother’s first cousin, turned away without a word when she wished them “Good day.” There seemed to be no one left on earth who would share her grief.

The carrion birds of the guerrillas arrived at her door the next morning in the persons of Foto Bollis, Christos Skevis and Elia Poulos, the die-hard
Communists who had returned to the village after Operation Pergamos and been rewarded with administrative positions. “Give us everything, whatever you have,” Foto Bollis demanded. He opened a wooden chest and found a few pounds of flour and some ears of corn that Eleni had left. The men loaded everything in cloth sacks. “Leave me enough to bake a loaf of bread,” Glykeria pleaded.

“We’ve been authorized to confiscate everything,” Bollis replied. To the others he said, “I saw some ripe corn in the fields. Get it.” As he turned away, the girl took off one of the slippers she was wearing and threw it at him, bouncing it off the back of his head. When the door slammed, she curled up in a ball, still clutching her mother’s dress, and prepared to die.

Later that day Eugenia Petsis came up from the ruined mill nearby where she lived. “Come to my house, child,” she whispered. “Your mother asked me to look after you, and I will. But you have to promise not to try to escape or they’ll kill us all.” Glykeria nodded obediently. Before she walked out the door, she took off the red dress she had been wearing for three months and put on her mother’s brown dress, the only garment left in the house.

The next morning Stavroula Yakou tracked the girl down in the Petsis mill and ordered her back to the security police for more questioning. Stavroula took pleasure in persecuting the daughter of the Amerikana, one of the girls she had envied when her own family was living off the scraps from the Gatzoyiannis table. She made Glykeria her special victim during the next two weeks, arriving every morning to lead her up to the security-police station for questioning, assigning her every afternoon to work details: carrying wounded guerrillas and supplies to Tsamanta. It was a dangerous journey, leading an overburdened mule over the mountain paths through heavy shelling. Glykeria moved like an automaton, deaf to the cannon fire and the cries of the wounded. She often returned from Tsamanta on the back of a mule, so tired that she would doze off and fall from the saddle. At the end of each day’s journey, Stavroula Yakou would be waiting for her with the words “Now you’re going again, this time for Olga and next for Kanta’s turn.”

One morning after the daily interrogation session, Stavroula was leading Glykeria back down the path when she stopped at the door of her mother, Anastasia Yakou. As they were talking, a procession on horseback passed by. It was Sotiris Drapetis leading the Migdalis couple and another prisoner back to Babouri. All three had been savagely beaten and had their hands tied behind their backs. Sotiris preened under Stavroula’s admiring gaze. “Hey, girl,” he shouted to her as she smiled at him, her teeth gleaming like bleached almonds. “After we go round that bend down there, listen and you’ll hear three bullets. I’m going to kill them and dump them in the ravine.”

Within minutes, just as Sotiris had promised, they heard three shots and Stavroula’s mother crossed herself. “The poor souls are gone,” she sighed. But later they learned that Sotiris had only been amusing himself by frightening
the prisoners. They were put to death the next day in a public execution in Babouri’s churchyard before the eyes of the entire village, including their elderly parents and small children, who were warned that if they made a sound, they, too, would die. Koula Migdalis was a strong woman and it took several rounds to kill her. Afterward the guerrillas left the bodies in the churchyard for several days as an example to the villagers.

The guerrilla command decided to send a last group of children for the
pedomasoma
to Albania. They would have to go over the mountaintops to the northeast, because the roads toward Tsamanta were under heavy shelling.

Dina Venetis, who had been released after the trial, was approached by a woman guerrilla who told her to prepare her nine-year-old son, Vangeli: “He’s leaving today.” Dina ran down to her house. “I found him some clothes,” she says, “a little jacket. Some shoes he never liked. They were too tight but I made him put them on.”

The mothers and children were gathered in the village square. “There were about a dozen of us from Lia,” Dina recalls. “Other groups of mothers and children came up the mountain from other villages. One boy had been bitten on the way by a rabid dog. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine once he’s inside,’ the guerrillas told us. ‘Our doctors will take care of him.’ When they got to Albania he went crazy. They shut him up in a room and tied him because he was biting his own hands. He died in terrible pain.”

The mothers were told they could accompany the children as far as the Chapel of St. Nicholas. “When we got to the place,” Dina says, “I kissed Vangeli and turned away. I was afraid to cry in front of him. As soon as he took a few steps, the heel came off one of his shoes and I watched him limping all the way up the mountain.” When she mentions the shoes she always starts to cry. “He was nine when he left, and when he came back, he was sixteen years old,” she adds, recovering her composure, “but he looked twelve, no more, thin as an ax handle, his bones pushing through his skin.”

As news of the planned attack on the Mourgana filtered back to the refugee community in Igoumenitsa, the Gatzoyiannis family passed each day in increasing suspense. Marianthe Ziaras, who had joined her family in Filiates after her escape, said that Eleni and Alexo were in jail but had not been tried. Then word reached them that a young
andartina
from Lia named Xantho Michopoulos had been found gravely wounded on a battlefield near Vrosina and was carried by soldiers to a hospital in Filiates. The girl had been conscripted into the same group as Kanta and was a cousin of Spiro Michopoulos. She would surely know what was happening in Lia. Kitso Haidis decided to go to Filiates to learn what he could. Nitsa said she would
go with him. The children were left in the care of their grandmother, Megali, and their uncle Andreas.

Xantho Michopoulos did not live long enough to reach Filiates, but before she died she told the soldiers the names of the five civilians executed in Lia. When Kitso arrived at the army hospital in Filiates, he learned of his daughter’s death. Crazed with sorrow, he lunged for a wounded guerrilla nearby and tried to strangle him in revenge. Soldiers pulled him away.

Nitsa heard whispers as she shopped in the open market of the town. When she went to the house of Lukas Ziaras, one look at the faces of the tinker’s family confirmed her worst fears and she collapsed on the floor, screaming. She continued to keen for her sister all night until her voice was completely gone and she could only croak. In the morning Nitsa boarded an army truck back to Igoumenitsa, but her courage failed her and she told the children in a whisper that she had caught a cold which had developed into laryngitis. She added that the soldiers were about to attack the Mourgana villages and their grandfather had stayed behind to follow the army into Lia and learn the fate of their mother. “She knew about the executions all along and never said a word,” Olga exclaimed later, “even though I was going around Igoumenitsa in a red kerchief, like a bride.”

Kitso stayed behind in Filiates to nurse his grief alone and wait for the liberation of Lia. He walked about the old town, his features blurred by a stubble of beard, his erect posture replaced by the shuffle of an old man. He was a true peasant, loath to bare his feelings, suspicious of everyone. He became obsessed with the idea of returning to Lia to see the truth with his own eyes. The soldiers said it was only a matter of days before the attack on the Mourgana would begin.

The plan of Operation Taurus called for two brigades of government troops to advance toward the Mourgana villages from the south in a diversionary action and to unleash a downpour of bombs and heavy artillery on the guerrilla fortress until the morale of the 1,500 men barricaded there was shattered. Then two other brigades, creeping along the peaks of the Albanian border down from the northeast, would launch the main thrust of the attack, a surprise assault on the highest peak of the Mourgana. If it fell, the guerrillas would be cut off from their escape route to Albania and the pipeline through which they had been receiving reinforcements and supplies.

The assault, bombing and artillery fire from the south began on September 10, two weeks after Eleni’s execution. The rain of death was heavier than the village had ever seen. Several houses were hit by bomber planes. One village woman was struck by a piece of shrapnel which entered her mouth and projected from the side of her head, but she would not die for several days.

The guerrillas ordered the Liotes to gather in caves high above the
Perivoli. Most of the people spent the night of September
II
huddled in the same caves where they had hidden from the Italians and where their ancestors had taken refuge for centuries. Glykeria was crowded in with her second cousin, Vangelina Gatzoyiannis, and her five children. Before dark, a bomber swooped low over the clearing, disgorging a blizzard of paper leaflets. Gregory Tsavos, the elderly field warden who had spoken up for Eleni at the trial, picked up one of the leaflets and read it aloud to the crowd that gathered. It was signed by General Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos, the commander of the First Army Corps, whose Eighth Division was leading the assault, and it told the villagers to take courage and stand firm: “We are coming to liberate you. We will soon be in your village.” Their eyes swollen from lack of sleep, the Liotes exchanged nervous whispers as they crawled back into the caves; the soldiers were on their way but they knew the guerrillas would never leave them behind to welcome them.