Eleni (23 page)

“No, thank you,” said Eleni. “They’ve gone so many years now without a cap, without a new dress, they can wait until the war is over and America opens up.” She saw he was hurt. “I can’t take clothes that belong to people who are being led away to their deaths,” she explained.

Aware that she had punctured his joy at his good fortune, Eleni took her son’s hand and turned away. As she climbed the path she could hear some of the women insisting that Lambros take the gifts back. God punishes those who steal from the dead, they said. Other women scolded them for talking foolishness. It’s not as if Lambros had done anything to the Jews!

By the evening of the next day two tailors and a seamstress from neighboring villages had taken up residence in the good chamber of the Petsis house and set to work on Milia’s dowry, making long sleeveless tunics, short black velvet vests, satin aprons and twenty dresses in a rainbow of colors. The seamstress embroidered everything with threads of real gold and silver.

The dowry was nearly finished when Milia fell to the floor one morning as if dead. She awoke with her face twisted into a grimace that would remain for the rest of her life. Everyone told the heartbroken father that he must not blame himself.

Milia couldn’t say a word; she lay on her pallet making signs to her parents that she wanted to die. After some months she learned to utter garbled words which only her family could understand. But by then the tailors had returned to their villages, and the prospective groom had fled to Athens.

Milia’s tragedy occurred just before Easter, which fell on April 16 in 1944. War or no war, the Liotes were determined to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and their survival through another year.

At Saturday midnight the bells of Holy Trinity caroled the triumphant news: “Christ is risen!” From mountain to mountain other church bells answered: “He is risen indeed!”

Easter Sunday dawned fresh and bright, even though there was still snow in the shadows of the peaks. Eleni awakened early to help her next-door neighbor Tassos Bartzokis prepare the Easter kid, which their families would share. Tassos’ wife was eight months pregnant and not well enough to do the heavy cooking, so Eleni made the big pot of hot, lemony, dill-fragrant soup from the goat’s entrails to break the long fast. Fotini and Glykeria had been busy since Thursday burnishing the crimson eggs with olive oil.

The next morning the pot of soup was still warm on the hearth when an ELAS
andarte
raced into the village square, and the bells began to toll with
the news everyone had feared for so long: a battalion of Germans was on its way to the Mourgana from the direction of the Great Ridge. The scraps of the Easter feast were left on the tables as everyone piled blankets, pots, food and cradles on the mules and set off up the mountain.

The threat of the Italian invasion over three years before had sent the villagers only as far as the caves, but their fear of the Germans was so much greater that they now fled over their own mountains to the last level clearing before the Albanian border.

It was up the cornucopia of green vegetation between the peaks of Kastro and the Prophet Elias that the Liotes hurried, rushing toward the high plateau beyond them which concealed a sheltered triangular patch of flat land the villagers still call the Agora, the ancient word for marketplace, although it had been empty for twenty-three centuries. In this hidden spot the Liotes hoped they could camp, safe from the invading Germans.

The old and crippled were carried on stretchers or lashed onto mules. Tassina Bartzokis, heavy with the weight of the unborn baby, struggled behind her donkey, which was so burdened with her invalid father and pots of food that it lost its footing and nearly rolled down the cliff. Eleni pulled Nikola by the hand up the steep path and caught up with Megali, who was driving the goats and worrying aloud about her stubborn sister-in-law, Anastasia Haidis. Anastasia was one of the two old women who had refused to leave the village. If the Germans wanted her old bones, she insisted despite her family’s protests, they were welcome to them. “I’ve eaten my bread, I’ve burned my oil.”

As Anastasia watched the tide of humanity surge up the mountainside, leaving her behind, she saw a movement on the hill above her and realized she was not entirely alone. The blind woman, Sophia Karapanou, was puttering around in her garden. There was no one to lead her to the Agora, and the ancient crone could no more leave the village than could the huge plane tree. Anastasia decided that she would take a plate of the stew she was making up to poor Sophia.

The streams of escaping villagers from different neighborhoods of Lia converged at the narrow pass between the two peaks of Kastro and Prophet Elias. As they hurried, jostling each other, through the gap that led to the sanctuary of the Agora, the Gatzoyiannis family looked up to their right and saw, ascending the slope toward the summit of Prophet Elias, a single file of ELAS
andartes
, their rifles silhouetted against the sun. The last one in line was Mitsi Bollis.

No longer venting his malice in petty tricks like letting the fox into the Gatzoyiannis’ chicken house, Mitsi had gained renown as one of ELAS’ most zealous and sadistic “interrogators.” He had even been immortalized in a popular bit of doggerel: “Better to be hit by rifle volleys / Than by the club of Mitsi Bollis.”

As the simian figure of Bollis followed the line of guerrillas up the mountain, the villagers hurried through the cleft below, gazing fearfully at
the armed men. But the cobbler, Andreas Kyrkas, emboldened by the fact that Bollis was a relative, shouted up at him, “Comrade Mitsi! Don’t tell me you’re planning to take on the Germans with a handful of
andartes!”

“We’ll shit on their fathers!” crowed Bollis, brandishing his rifle.

“And they’ll chop the whole village into their salad,” Andreas answered dryly. “It’s better to melt in the sunlight and strike by the moon.”

Bollis eyed him. “I’ll report your advice to the
kapetanios
,” he said and turned back up the mountain.

“Well done, husband!” Nitsa moaned when Bollis was out of earshot. “Now you’ve fixed us all! He’ll have your name written on their slate for certain!”

“If they’re crazy enough to fire on the Germans, none of us will live to worry about the club of Mitsi Bollis,” muttered Kitso Haidis, who was behind her. “In Kefalovriso the Germans roasted twenty-one men, including a priest, because the
andartes
there fired on their patrol.”

Carrying Nikola astride her back and holding Fotini by the hand, Eleni led her family into the Agora, only to find that all the sheltered spots had already been taken by goats, cradles, pots and old women. As darkness fell, all fires had to be extinguished for fear of betraying their hiding place.

Tuesday passed with cold food and foreboding. Occasionally someone would walk as far as Prophet Elias and report back that there was no sign of life in the village, but that on the peak the
andartes
had dug themselves into a foxhole with their machine gun.

Eleni and her children were already asleep on Tuesday night, huddled together for warmth, when a shadowy figure rushed into the clearing and shouted that the monastery of St. Athanassios was in flames. For seven hundred years, the monastery had been a white landmark against the green foothills, three kilometers southwest of the village. It was there that the British airplanes had dropped supplies, and Christos Gatzoyiannis had said goodbye to his wife for the last time.

The news of the burning sparked furious disagreements among the refugees. If the Germans were at St. Athanassios, the majority insisted, they must be heading westward toward Tsamanta. That meant they would move through the pass above Tsamanta into Albania, circle around the opposite side of the Mourgana and sweep back down the mountain into Lia, flushing out
andartes
on the way and passing right over the spot where they were all now hiding. No one had anticipated that the Germans might come from the north.

The cobbler, Andreas, felt his courage snap. He was not a coward, but during the Anatolian wars in 1921, somewhere outside of Ankara, he had been shot and left for dead in a muddy ditch for four days. Nightmares of that ditch began to wake him after he saw beaten villagers stagger out of the schoolhouse, bleeding from the blows of the ELAS inquisitors. Now the approach of the Germans had shattered his nerves altogether. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he begged. “They’ll catch us like sparrows in quicklime!”

Kitso Haidis began to pace. “But if they veer east at Kamitsani and we head down, we’ll run right into them,” he worried. Eleni looked from her father to her brother-in-law, praying that they would stop arguing and make the right decision before the Germans arrived.

The argument raged all night. Should they stay or leave, and where could they go? Tasso Bartzokis watched his wife sleeping, a vein pulsing in her neck, her belly swollen like a ripe pomegranate. Her lips were blue. He was sure the cold would kill the baby. He thought of his dead parents’ house near the village of Kostana in the foothills, where his sister-in-law now lived. The other side of the house was empty. They could hide there, out of the cold. He turned to Eleni and asked if she wanted to bring her family and hide with them at Kostana. His wife’s baby might come early and it would make her feel safer to have her close friend and neighbor along. Eleni was tempted. Her children were suffering from exposure on the cold mountainside. In a house she could heat them some food. She looked at her father, who shook his head and said, “It’s too dangerous!” Then, for the first time, Eleni decided to take the decision for her family’s fate into her own hands. “You can stay here,” she told Kitso, “but I’m taking the children and going to Kostana.”

By morning Eleni’s choice had prevailed and Kitso and Megali as well as Nitsa and Andreas had all elected to go with her. As soon as it was light they put Tassina on the mule and set off while the rest of the villagers on the plateau warned them they were walking straight to their deaths.

At the same moment, the inhabitants of Babouri were also wondering how to save themselves. The smoke of the monastery meant that the Germans would be in their village soon. All the young men had fled the previous day, but before they left, Fotis Economou, one of the EDES sympathizers who had been beaten in Lia’s schoolhouse, made a pact with one of the ELAS leaders, both men setting aside their mutual hatred to save the village. Fotis advised the women and old men staying behind to welcome the Germans and offer them refreshments, and the ELAS captain there commanded his guerrillas hiding in the foothills below not to fire on the enemy for the sake of the village.

“The drowning man grasps his own hair,” the peasants often remarked, and in their terror the people of Babouri grasped at the one hope in their midst, Katina Tatsis. She was no different in appearance from any other black-clad, middle-aged peasant woman, but in her youth she had been a schoolteacher in Kavala and she could speak six languages, including German.

The villagers asked her to interpret for them. As everyone made ready for the enemy’s arrival, Katina was the only person in the Mourgana mountains who was thinking of Cavafy’s poem: “The barbarians will arrive today/And they’re bored by eloquence and public speeches.” Now the fate
of her community depended on Katina’s eloquence in a tongue she scarcely remembered.

I hung on my mother’s hand during the three-hour walk to the outskirts of Kostana, trying not to listen to my uncle’s nervous whispers and my grandfather’s curses. Descending the mountain in the chill morning air, we saw no sign of the Germans, but by the time we reached the Bartzokis house and found the key to the empty half, Tassina was so weak she had to be lifted from the mule. While she was carried into her sister-in-law’s quarters, Fotini and I explored the other side. There was a fireplace, large stuffed floor pillows, a low table and even a kneading trough.

My uncle Andreas followed us in and stationed himself at the northern window, where he muttered, “They’re coming closer, I can feel it.” To escape his forebodings, I wandered into the other side of the house, where Tassina was resting. It startled me to find her crying. Her husband was explaining that he was leaving to camp atop the hill called Lykou, four miles to the east, where he could see the Germans from a distance, whether they came from the north or the south. If they were coming down from the mountains, he said, he’d run back and warn us. If they came from the south—well, he said, stroking her hair, they weren’t likely to harm a house full of children and a pregnant woman. Tassina didn’t answer, but just kept crying and turned her face to the wall.

Everywhere I turned I was met with the sight of the adults in our party, including the men who had always seemed so decisive, falling apart before the threat of the Germans’ arrival. I tried to imagine the Germans and could think only of a fierce wind, churning its way inexorably toward us, uprooting huge trees in its path and tossing them aside.

The general hysteria was beginning to affect me, and I returned to the other side of the house. I found my mother and grandmother making corn bread, aprons tied around their waists, kneading the yellow dough in the bread trough, while delicious, yeasty smells filled the room. The homely sight of my mother doing these familiar chores reassured me and made me feel less vulnerable to the faceless dangers outside.

“After three days in the mountains the children need to get some warm food in their stomachs and sleep under a roof for one night,” my mother said, straightening up from her work and rubbing one floury arm across her forehead.

“They’ll see the smoke from the chimney,” Andreas protested, his voice rising. “Our best chance is out there where we can run and hide.”

My mother said in an even voice that held an unfamiliar firmness, “We’ll go tomorrow. Tonight we’ll sleep here.”

My uncle shrugged and capitulated, resuming his vigil at the window as he muttered to no one in particular. “And if tomorrow is too late?”
Despite his doubts, the calm resolution of my mother’s face, her cheeks warmed by the cooking fire, comforted me, and I curled up near the hearth, waiting for the corn bread to be ready.