Eleni (11 page)

On a warm spring morning in June, Eleni and Kanta set out down the mountain toward the central square, where they would take the path to Vasilo’s house. On the way they passed some of the tinkers of the village straggling toward the
cafenions
. Since the occupation began, the far-flung cobblers, coopers and tinkers of Lia had begun drifting home. No one had money anymore to buy new shoes, barrels or pots, and the men, forced into idleness, now passed the time tilling their fields or just sitting listlessly in the coffeehouse near the village square at bare tables.

Most of the men of Lia were tinkers, the traditional occupation of the Greek villages north of the Kalamas River in the province of Epiros. They called themselves
kalantzides
, a word derived from the solder, or
kalai
, which was the staple of their trade. Christos Gatzoyiannis had learned the tinker’s trade from his father and traveled as an apprentice from the age of eight, earning one English pound a month, scouring pots with hydrochloric acid and sand, sometimes applying it to flat-bottomed casseroles with an expert shuffling of his bare feet on the leather rags.

The
kalantzides
ordinarily left the village in mid-February, before the beginning of the Great Lent, fanning out to Macedonia, Thessaly, Roumeli, Euboea, Attica, and even north to Albania. Those who went as far as Crete and Rhodes would not see their families again for two or three years. They traveled with their tools and pots on their backs or loaded on a donkey.

Before the occupation, a housewife was happy to pay a few drachmas to have a pot cleaned, patched, resoldered and polished to a new-penny shine while the tinker brought her up to date on births, deaths and kidnappings of brides from the villages he had passed through. The tinkers of the Mourgana had developed their own language,
alifiatika
, for talking together without being understood by the customers. Tinkers were generally regarded as rascals and thieves who mixed their solder with lead and who beat and starved their boy apprentices, but many tinkers of Lia prided themselves on their skill and integrity.

Sometimes the men returned home coughing with tuberculosis contracted
from sleeping on the ground in abandoned shacks between the blazing fire of the forge and the wet damp of the night. But if he avoided card games, prostitutes and brigands, a
kalantzis
before the war could return with close to 20,000 drachmas a year.

Now all sources of
kalai
and copper, both imported, were dried up. Some tinkers tried to scrounge bits of solder by burning the tin cans thrown away by the Italian soldiers on the banks of the Kalamas, then sifting the ashes. But most simply gave up. Among them was the cobbler Andreas Kyrkas, the husband of Eleni’s sister, a quiet, worried man with basset-hound eyes and his black hair combed up over his bald pate in an upside-down question mark. Andreas nursed his last bottle of
tsipouro
and reflected aloud, “By winter we’ll be eating the shoe leather.”

The
cafenions
of Lia were not real coffeehouses like those in the cities, but
pantopoleons
—general stores of the same gray stone as the houses, filled with exotic odors and a jumble of everything the villagers could not grow themselves. Before the war there had been open sacks of aromatic coffee beans, rice, sugar and salt, boxes of salty smoked herring and sheets of dried cod, barrels of pungent feta cheese and olives in brine, kegs of wine and the local moonshine,
tsipouro
, distilled from the crushed grapes, huge blocks of soap and chocolate from which pieces were cut to order, school notebooks, hoe, pick and ax heads, needles, ribbons, handkerchiefs, boxes of Turkish delight in drifts of powdered sugar, and bottles of jewel-colored syrups for cool summer drinks.

Inside these crowded emporia, surrounded by the piles of riches, women used to count out their coins and gossip with the proprietors while their children eyed the jars of hard candies, hoping for a free sample. Outside was the kingdom of the men, where affairs of state were settled while the owner and his family scurried back and forth, bringing drinks, coffee, backgammon boards, playing cards, and tidbits of cheese and olives. Now there was nothing left to order and no money to pay with, but the men still sat like broken clocks gathered around the half-dozen metal folding tables outside each coffeehouse, playing backgammon and
kseri
and watching the passing parade, hoping that a traveler would bring news of the war from beyond the Kalamas.

The returning tinkers reported that the Germans had taken over the largest cities, ports and major islands, allowed the Bulgarians to occupy the easternmost provinces and left the less desirable interior regions, including the Mourgana villages, under the administration of the Italians. Because they had no appetite for living on mountain peaks, the Italians settled in the large towns—Filiates was the closest to Lia, twenty-eight miles away. They sent a dozen
carabinieri
to Keramitsa, six miles southeast, to oversee the region. Travel from one town to another was difficult, the tinkers reported, because passes had to be obtained from the local Italian and German authorities in every town.

The Italians showed little interest in Lia apart from sending occasional
patrols of
carabinieri
and Chams to search for hidden weapons, and dispatching four Greek constables to man the village police station, which had been empty since the former gendarmes left to join the war. The new men, members of the Greek rural police recalled to duty by the collaborationist government, settled in nervously.

As Eleni and Kanta traversed the main square, passing the coffeehouse of Kosta Poulos, they saw a spot of color in the drab crowd. Like peacocks in a flock of crows, three young men sat at one table, dressed in white high-collared shirts and European suits, idly clicking strings of onyx worry beads in clean hands embellished by a long pointed nail on the little finger—the hallmark of an educated Greek gentleman who does not do manual labor. The young men, schoolteachers all, were holding court.

The rank of schoolteacher was at the very apex of the social ladder in Lia, inspiring almost religious awe in the souls of the villagers. In all of Lia’s history, only a handful of local children had gone beyond high school, and it seemed to the Liotes a near-miracle that these three had become schoolteachers.

No one was surprised that Minas Stratis, thirty-two, had reached such eminence, for he was the son of one of the prosperous clans of the village. The Stratis family owned a thriving shop in Albania where copper pots were made and sold, and they could well afford to educate one of their own. But the two Skevis brothers, Prokopi and Spiro, were sons of a poor farmer who scraped a living from a few small plots of land below the village. Although his nails were permanently rimmed with dirt, Sioli Skevis burned with the ambition to educate his boys somehow.

He had sold one of his precious fields to send them to school in Filiates, and then, determined to find a place in the academy at Vela—a combination high school, teachers institute and seminary twenty miles east of Lia—Sioli took his dark-eyed, solemn son Prokopi to court Bishop Spyridon of Yannina.

Sioli and the boy camped outside the Bishop’s palace, accosting him every day as he passed, dogging his footsteps until he relented and agreed to find room at Vela for Prokopi, even though it was a school created for impoverished Greek children from Albania. Sioli felt triumphant, but Prokopi never forgot how his father and he had been forced to beg for a place that should have been his by merit.

Two years later Sioli tried to enroll his youngest son in Vela as well, but months of beseeching the bishop in Yannina did no good and he finally dragged the boy off to Corfu, where he threatened to place Spiro in a Catholic seminary to serve the Pope. The bluff succeeded where entreaties had failed. Finally Bishop Spyridon relented and agreed to let Spiro, too, into Vela.

Sioli felt he had done well. No other farmer’s sons in Lia would have such an opportunity. But he was a simple man who didn’t suspect that his boys would come home with more than a knowledge of history and mathematics.
They had grown to scorn their father for the toadying he did on their behalf and to despise the system that forced them to grovel. They were fertile ground for the ideology that had infiltrated the school at Vela.

It happened that nearby, in the town of Kalpaki, the Greek army had set up a military camp where suspected Communists in the ranks were sent to a disciplinary company to complete their military service under rigorous control.

Among the penalized soldiers at Kalpaki were many who would emerge as major Communist figures during the war. They succeeded in spreading Communist ideas within the school at Vela, instilling in impressionable boys like the Skevis brothers the determination to build a future Greece free of privilege and favor.

The seeds planted at Vela would soon bear deadly fruit, but in the summer of 1941 the three unemployed teachers sat in the village square of Lia discussing the war, and no one thought of the Skevis brothers as Communists, nor did Minas Stratis suspect what a gulf already separated him from his two colleagues.

Minas, as befitted the most prominent of the three, always sported a carefully knotted foulard at his throat, and a heavy watch chain draped across his thin chest and attached to a gold watch which he consulted so frequently that one might think his life was filled with important engagements.

The two Skevis brothers spent the days in his company, even though they resented Minas’ superior status in the village and the fact that before the war he had won the plum that all three wanted: assignment to the school in Lia, where he could live in the Stratis compound of houses with his wife. Prokopi Skevis had been exiled to a remote school in a poor Moslem village outside Filiates. Spiro, after a long wait for an assignment while he substituted occasionally for Minas, had finally been assigned to Riniasa, a village near the southern tip of Epiros.

The two Skevis brothers burned with the same revolutionary fervor, but they were opposites in appearance and temperament. Prokopi, twenty-nine, was short and swarthy enough to pass for a gypsy. He was a man who thought before he acted, and his eloquence inspired trust and loyalty. Spiro, who was two years younger, was taller and fairer than his brother and so thin that if a fly should alight on one of his matchstick legs, his friends joked, it would snap under the weight. Spiro’s flesh seemed consumed by the intensity of his soul; his temper could boil up into raging anger and, ultimately, drive him to murder.

But as Eleni and Kanta approached them, the three young schoolteachers were chatting amiably, trying to fill the empty afternoon with talk. Eleni greeted them, speaking first to Minas Stratis, who was her second cousin as well as Kanta’s schoolmaster. With formal courtesy and the elaborate vocabulary that he affected, Minas replied to her greeting and asked where they were bound. When Eleni explained about taking Kanta to learn from
the shepherdess, Spiro Skevis broke in angrily. “It’s a waste!” he snapped. “The village girls go simple-minded up there with the flocks, and Kanta’s the most promising of the lot!”

Eleni replied coolly that she would try not to neglect Kanta’s education, but that in times such as these, everyone had to make sacrifices. Mother and daughter continued on their way, leaving the schoolmasters to the tedium of the hot afternoon.

The three could feel the worried eyes of the villagers upon them, waiting for a word or a sign. In Greece’s history, rebellion had always been ignited by educated men. The peasants of Lia, full of admiration for their schoolteachers, expected them to do something about their plight.

Inevitably, the three men spoke together about forming a resistance movement, which would take root in the secret places of the mountains, like the freedom fighters of the War of Independence. They always spoke theoretically. “Tell me your thoughts, Minas—who would you want in a resistance group if you happened to form one?” Prokopi asked politely.

Minas paused to consider the question from all angles, as he always did, before he spoke. “Men like Foto Gatzoyiannis, the miller Yiorgi Mitros, Nashelis, I suppose,” he replied finally. “Men who know the mountains and are good marksmen.”

Prokopi listened with a show of respect and suggested that Minas make a list of likely candidates. But after Minas had left the table, the two Skevis brothers laughed together at the other teacher’s naïveté. They knew that men with flocks and families weren’t likely to desert them and take to the mountains. It was the young, hungry and poor who would die for an idea. Those were the men they wanted and the ones whom the Skevis brothers secretly began to organize in the summer of 1941. They did not tell Minas what they were doing.

The swallows abandoned their mud nests and the autumn rains sent walnuts rattling down onto the roofs like bony fingers tapping, as the people of Lia harvested and stored every bean and ear of corn. In November, when the skies became heavy with the threat of snow, the collaborationist government ordered the schools to reopen, and the three schoolteachers returned to their posts. But the villagers wondered aloud how they could send children to school when there was no money for bread, much less shoes.

Spiro Skevis was sent back to Riniasa, near Preveza, and used his position as a cover while helping to organize a resistance group under the very noses of the Germans. Prokopi Skevis returned to the school in the Moslem village of Solopia, near Filiates. Now and again he would be recognized, traveling from village to village in the company of itinerant peddlers, stopping to speak to men who had fought the Italians.

Minas Stratis had long ago prepared his lessons and he rejoiced when the government decided that the schools should open at last. His students
considered him cold and distant, but Minas believed wholeheartedly in improving the future of Lia’s children by teaching them to read and write and to wonder about the world beyond their mountains.

The authorities warned Minas to leave history, politics and “opinions” out of his lessons. When school opened, on a frosty day late in November, he surveyed the sixty ragged, foul-smelling children who stumbled into the classroom on feet that were bare or bound with rags, and wondered how anyone could expect him to sow defiance on such unpromising soil.