Orthokostá (2 page)

This process was fed by a gradual escalation of violence. The destruction of nationalist guerrilla bands and the ensuing repression by the Communists encouraged a grassroots opposition to EAM and ELAS that remained silent so long as it was unarmed. However, when the Germans began to supply the dissidents with weapons in the spring and summer of 1944, this opposition became both vocal and violent. Now areas that had been ruled by EAM came under the control of the occupiers and their collaborators. But this period was brief; almost immediately the Germans began retreating in anticipation of their departure from Greece. It was then that ELAS returned with a vengeance and destroyed the villages that had been disloyal to it such as Kastri.

Nor did this cycle of violence stop with the end of the Occupation. The Communist insurrection in Athens in December 1944 provided the stage for new atrocities, followed by low-intensity warfare in 1945–46, which was accompanied by the persecution, formal and informal, of real and suspected Communists. The Civil War moved into its final phase, often referred to as “the” Greek Civil War, in 1946. Now, however, the main theater of armed action was northern Greece, which explains why this conflict does not appear very much in
Orthokostá
.

When examining the grassroots collaboration, we cannot help but wonder about individual motives. Why would so many people ally with the Germans, who were at best disliked and at worse hated? Some of the narrators provide straightforward answers:

The Battalions weren't formed in Trípolis only. They were in all the towns of the Peloponnese. Those were times of national emergency. No Greek ever liked the Germans. Or wanted to collaborate with them. That's when the Peloponnese Battalions were created. In the spring of 1944. When it was becoming
clear that the Germans were losing the war. And it was also becoming clear how dangerous it would be for anyone who might find himself at the mercy of ELAS after the German collapse. After they cleared out. . . . EAM and ELAS were the imminent danger. They would wipe us all out. Any of us who didn't want to or wouldn't consent to join them. That's how we saw it—and that's how it was.

The Battalions were formed later on. As a reaction to everything that had happened. To the arrests and the executions.

Of course these answers only scratch the surface of a complex issue. It is fascinating to explore the multiple drivers of what appear to be straightforward political choices but in reality are multifaceted processes that include everything from personal disputes and local vendettas to concerns about survival and safety by a population caught between two fires:

Take the village of Oriá. They hated anyone from Karátoula, so much hatred between those two villages.

So I went and enlisted. I owed that time. But that's what always happens. Where will you get food, where will you sleep? In the barracks. Wherever they give you food. That was the beginning of the enlistments. On both sides. That was one reason to enlist. And the other was safety. In the mountains no one came after you. You went around, you ate, you drank, you got laid. Otherwise you were a reactionary, and you were hounded. You ended up in the Battalions. You found a place to lay your head.

The rebels came here, they said, Leave your houses, all of you. Whoever stays in the village will be executed. And the Germans dropped leaflets. Stay in your homes, no one will harm you.

This was a world dominated by violence, which was both a cause of individual choices and behaviors but also their inevitable consequence, taking endless shapes and forms because “a human life
wasn't worth much then, that's how things were.” Or as another narrator puts it simply: “Ruthless men.”

Violence could be indiscriminate, but more often it was highly personal. Indeed, this was a highly personalized war, which only made it that much more terrifying. We cannot help but shudder at statements like “It was our cousin Paraskevás who marched our brother Kóstas up along the river” or “An exceptional man, a progressive farmer, among the best in the area. And that splendid young man was taken to the detention camp by his own brothers. Who executed him later on.”

As is often the case, the mechanism that reproduced and escalated violence was revenge, a central feature of many narratives and a powerful driver of violent behavior in general: “We were young then. We wanted revenge.” When it comes to revenge, the narratives that stand out include the terrible first-person description of the ordeal imposed on a rival (“With my brother killed and everything, just like I told you. I was fourteen, fifteen. And that's why I took care of Pavlákos later on. I beat him for one whole day and one night.”), or the third-person description of the beating of a Communist by the husband of the pregnant woman he had allegedly condemned to death (“I wish I hadn't seen all that”). It is also striking how revenge transcends geography: escaping to Athens offered no respite, as revenge-seekers followed their enemies and took advantage of the chaotic situation to target and assassinate them. Inevitably, revenge caused counter-revenge, violence led to more violence. Even after the violence stopped, the memory of it shaped people's identities and affected their behavior in lasting ways.

Not everything in the novel is bleak, however. There is a flip side to the revenge narratives, for instance, consisting of accounts of positive reciprocity when people who protected others by erasing a few names from a target list, intervening on someone's behalf, or refusing to denounce someone who victimized them were later protected in a moment of need by those they had helped. The story of Yiórgos and Yeorghía in
chapter 2
is particularly moving in this respect.

The violence also has its absurd side. We find it in the story of the young woman who stitched a crown instead of a hammer and sickle on the berets she made for the Communist guerrillas and almost lost her life because of it, the man who was executed by the Germans when they found that the papers he had stuffed into his shoes to blunt the nails holding the soles were EAM leaflets, or the Security Battalion officer who survived many difficult moments only to be assassinated in Athens where he went to pursue his love interest. The pinnacle of absurdity is probably reached when German troops turn out as the liberators of the peasants being held by the guerrillas in the monastery detention camp.

Of course, taking all these complex processes into account does not mean that we need to accept that the choices made by these individuals are morally justified. It is worth stressing here that
Orthokostá
is by no means one-sided. We find in it extensive descriptions of atrocities committed by the Security Battalions (see, for example,
chapters 6
and
33
), while several narrators provide many qualifications and counterpoints. However, critics who accuse Valtinos of equating understanding with excusing miss the book's point, which is to reveal the intricate universe into which all these people moved and to immerse us in it. On that score,
Orthokostá
is an unmitigated success.

Does its unrelenting focus on this complex reality make
Orthokostá
an amoral account? Quite the opposite. I would argue instead that it is deeply moral. Although no attempt is made to apportion responsibility for the atrocities, several stories contain elements of a “moral economy” shared by most narrators, one that privileges an understanding of individual responsibility embedded in its context, as opposed to a general and abstract judgment. In this view, most people are seen as subject to their own passions and the prevailing social norms, victims of the terrible situation in which they found themselves. It is often hard to blame them, for they are hardly masters of their own volition. Nor, obviously, can they be praised. Yet at the same time certain actions are singled out, either positively or negatively: positively, when people transcend their limitations to perform
unexpected good deeds (“He wasn't a die-hard Communist. He would cover for our fellow villagers.”); negatively, when individuals transcend them in the opposite direction to commit random or excess violence, as do militiamen such as the Galaxýdis brothers and Kóstas Kotrótsos, who were trigger-happy, looters, “unprincipled drifter[s],” or simply “animal[s],” or the old man who helped the militiamen set a house on fire:

And on their way up to the square old Yiánnis Prásinos says, Haven't you set it ablaze yet? And he took out his flint lighter. They were going to burn it down one way or another. But old Yiánnis, he gave them his lighter. He tossed it to them from his bench. May God forgive him.

Orthokostá
may be read as an account of the Greek Civil War as it was experienced in the villages of Kynouria: it is a fascinating and enlightening one. But it may also be read much more broadly, as an account of the human experience in the midst of extraordinarily harsh circumstances. This latter reading resonates powerfully with journalistic reports from contemporary civil wars and also with Thucydides' description of civil strife in the earlier Peloponnesian War: “Human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself.”

Orthokostá'
s narrators reassert, via Valtinos, Thucydides' perspective when they offer observations and reflections that encapsulate everlasting, almost biblical, truths:

It was God's wrath, all that, there's nothing else you can say.

And may all that never happen again.

Notre histoire est noble et tragique

Comme le masque d'un tyran.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cors de chasse,”
Alcools
(1913)

When Thanassis Valtinos first began writing, the literary climate in Greece was not particularly auspicious for fiction. Poetry was the dominant medium of expression, and formidable writers like George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Andreas Embirikos, and Yannis Ritsos were in the forefront, giving Greek poetry both national and international acclaim. The appearance in 1963 of Valtinos's novel
Η κάθοδος των εννιά
(The Descent of the Nine), however, set the pace for new forms of expression in prose fiction that had no precedent in terms of immediacy, terseness, and use of controversial subject matter—with the possible exception of the memoirs of the nineteenth-century general Ioannis Makrygiannis (published in 1907). Among Valtinos's contemporaries few had ventured to broach the occulted subject of the 1947–49 Greek Civil War in all its problematical dimensions. And while it was obvious to everybody that Valtinos's first novel dignified the sacrifices made in a lost ideological cause, it was also impossible for anyone to miss the harsh reality imposed by his telegraphic medium: the actual voices of the nine antigovernment rebels who perished through a variety of mishaps in an inhospitable landscape that forever withheld the redemption of the sea.

Valtinos's daring new voice in
The Descent of the Nine
had been preceded by only one Civil War novel worthy of a subject of such
political complexity and demanding such self-examination—Stratis Tsirkas's
Ακυβέρνητες πολιτείες
(Drifting Cities, 1961–65)—and followed by a mere handful of comparable attempts, such as Yannis Beratis's
Το Πλατύ ποτάμι
(The Wide River, 1946–65), and Aris Alexandrou's
Το Κιβώτιο
(The Box, 1974). But these were solitary works; Valtinos has been revisiting the Civil War tragedy in cycles over the years, with narratives both long and short, most powerfully
Orthokostá
(1994). Taken together with Valtinos's other major works,
Orthokostá
holds pride of place as the most successful testing of the range fiction writing can achieve when plumbing the spaces between language and memory and the shading of the inhuman into the humane. History in the making seems to be the chief end of the present novel, even as its numerous asides imply the impossibility of viewing history divorced from the light of art and thought.

Valtinos has sandwiched his narrative between two texts, one ascribed to an eighteenth-century cleric named Isaakios, perhaps the last humanist to project the virtues of ancient Arcadia onto the landscape of the southeastern Peloponnese, the Christian monastery in its middle notwithstanding; and the other an epilogue that debunks the good cleric's utopian opener. Between the extreme sublimation at the outset and the grim realities that have intervened by the end, the novel similarly appears to have two hearts: one beating to the drum taps of the ancient epics, the other to the transport of lyricists like Tyrtaeus, Callinus, and George Seferis.

It would be natural for an explorer of literary texts to want to prospect, upon first leafing through this book, for the presence of any sign promising the joyful experience of poetry—the aspect of any artifact, in other words, that would determine the quality of the time invested in the reading. If the precritical indicators could serve as guides and
Orthokostá
proved indeed to be the kind of “news that
STAYS
news,” in Ezra Pound's definition, they certainly informed the
impact that the book made when it was launched in 1994. A first rather short, page-long chapter, a much longer second, and then a surprising, barely twenty lines long, third must surely have raised intriguing questions regarding the conventions
Orthokostá
embodied. These rough, apperceptive data are the novel's invitational markers—one thinks of the four initial notes of Beethoven's Fifth—and a persistent reminder that the general thrust of the narrative and the relationship of its parts to the whole would need to be viewed on an equal footing with its other, more discursive materials.