Eleni (24 page)

The next morning before dawn, the Gatzoyiannis family, under the prodding of Kitso and Andreas, left Tassina in the care of her sister-in-law, and, driving the goats ahead of them, crept through the shuttered village toward a ridge crowned by a small chapel to St. Marina. On the far side, in a dried-up river bed that ran through a field, they made camp.

The same dawn found the women and old men of Babouri gathering at the churchyard on the western boundary of their village with Katina Tatsis at their head. The young women and children had hidden themselves behind closed shutters. Sometime after midday the old people watched in horrified fascination as a battalion of two hundred Germans and about sixty black-shirted Chams led by four mounted officers approached from the direction of the monastery of St. Athanassios.

The red earth shook under their boots as they stamped to a halt before the villagers, and their commandant dismounted. At a nod from Katina Tatsis, a dozen village grandmothers in their best black churchgoing dresses stepped forward holding large trays of walnuts, Turkish delight, white goat cheese and thimble-sized glasses of fiery moonshine. Katina began the speech she had been rehearsing all night.

“You and your men are welcome in Babouri,
Herr Kommandant
,” she said. “Our small village is at your disposal. Please to have some little refreshment.”

The man with the eagle patch above his breast pocket smiled and asked how she knew German. Katina told him she was a schoolteacher, a student of Goethe and Schiller, and uttered the second part of her prepared speech. “There are no
andartes
in Babouri. We beg of you not to judge our village by what other Greeks have done!”

If there were no
andartes
here, where were the young men? he asked. Katina replied that they were all itinerant peddlers or shepherds now in the high pastures with the animals.

The German soldiers passed a pleasant two hours lounging in the churchyard under a plane tree. They smacked their lips over the
tsipouro
and toasted the hospitality of the Babouriotes. “Good health!” they shouted to the assembled old people. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler!” the villagers responded, and Katina could feel sweat trickling between her breasts.

The commandant was a large, florid man who showed Katina photographs of his children and complimented her on the local cheese.

It was late afternoon when the Germans made ready to leave. The commandant thanked Katina for the village’s hospitality and added, “You see, if we are not provoked, it is not necessary to fear us.”

Then the battalion marched through the village moving toward Lia while
hidden eyes followed them from behind every shuttered window. When they were gone the villagers crowded around the exhausted Katina to congratulate her. They had escaped Armageddon thanks to some
tsipouro
and a middle-aged schoolmistress who knew a little German.

Half an hour later the euphoria dissolved with the news that the Germans were not quite gone. They had camped for the night halfway between Babouri and Lia, only ten minutes outside of the village.

That night a fine rain fell on the Germans in their tents outside Lia and on the Gatzoyiannis family huddled in the field by St. Marina. Eleni held Nikola and Fotini in her lap with an oilcloth draped over the three of them. The rainwater ran down her arms and the children’s bare legs.

The sun rose on mountains washed as clean as on the day of creation. The Germans awoke damp and irritable, looking down on foothills still hidden in morning mist. The commandant ordered an early start. He knew from his intelligence reports that just ahead was the home of the Skevis brothers, in a village so strongly sympathetic to ELAS that it was called “Little Moscow.” He was expecting trouble.

As the battalion rounded the last bend in the path to Lia, they saw the gray slate roofs of the village spread before them, touched by the first fingers of light. The heathery green of the mountainside was punctuated with puffs of golden broom and mauve Judas trees. Over it all glowered a sky heavy with rainclouds. It was the same supernatural light once painted by a man from Crete called El Greco, but the Germans were not admiring the view.

Near the western edge of the village Anastasia Haidis had risen early and left the house to take a covered copper pot of stew up the mountain to the blind woman, Sophia Karapanou.

The German battalion marched into the village, past the deserted Petsis house, and was just abreast of the double Haidis house when the morning hush was punctuated by the sound of machine-gun fire spattering from the heights of Prophet Elias, too far away to do any damage, sending puffs of smoke drifting up into the sky.

The German commandant shouted orders in a voice full of excitement. Perhaps the guerrillas were trying to lure them into the crags and hollows in order to have the advantage, but they would soon learn the price of their arrogance. Within moments, the Germans assembled half a dozen machine guns and an equal number of mortars, all trained toward Prophet Elias. Suddenly the whole side of the mountain below the chapel began to erupt as the Germans strafed it from bottom to top. Soon the slope was black and smoking.

The commandant ordered the firing to stop. Any
andartes
still on the mountainside must have been hit or driven off. Now it was time to punish the people who had sheltered them.

“Burn the village,” he ordered.

•  •  •

The moment the German fusillade ceased, Anastasia Haidis ran out of the blind woman’s house. She looked down and saw a thin wisp of smoke rising above the screen of cypress trees. “They’re burning my house!” she gasped. “My God, the goats are in the cellar!”

Sophia reached out sightlessly to hold her back, but Anastasia was already stumbling down the path, her hands waving at the unseen enemy. A knot of German soldiers watched her descending upon them like a shrieking raven. “Have mercy on my house, spare my goats!” she screamed, making the Chams smile. She threw herself against the door to the cellar, where the three goats could be heard bleating. One of the Chams came forward to pull her back. “Get away, old woman, or we’ll let you roast along with your goats!” he said.

As she watched the flames devour the house where she had lived since she was a bride of fourteen, Anastasia crumpled and they let her fall. Then, suddenly, she was on her feet, flying toward the door once more. As they dragged her back again, Anastasia’s screams rose over the roar of the fire and could be heard by Tassina Bartzokis all the way down to Kostana. The air carried the cries like disembodied spirits: “Children, where are you? Save me!” Above in the Perivoli, Sophia sat waiting in her own house, listening with the preternatural hearing of the blind to every moan that Anastasia uttered.

Drawn by the commotion, the commandant approached. He had just completed a tour of the village and was pleased with the progress. The school building and most of the houses were in flames. He looked down with satisfaction at the lower village and its centerpiece, the Church of the Virgin.

If the
cafenion
is the heart of a Greek village, the largest church is its soul. For seven centuries the Church of the Virgin had nourished the souls of the Liotes. Its interior was their pride and their Bible. No one needed to be literate to know the Holy Scriptures, for they were all illustrated here in the frescoes painted by the hand of monks long vanished into anonymity. In the soaring vault of the cupola, Christ the All-Powerful, thirty times the size of a mortal man, scrutinized the congregation below, his Gospel clasped in his hand. In the spaces between the windows, the prophets and apostles, painted full-length with bristling beards and mournful eyes, made their eternal parade toward the altar.

The villagers of Lia never tired of staring at the wonders of the Church of the Virgin: the walls glowed with every saint and martyr, the twelve feast days, the Last Supper, the life of the Virgin, and as a final warning, on the wall near the door, the Last Judgment, where bizarre dragons and devils punished every sort of evil, with the priests in the front rank of the sinners.

The jewel of the church was the magnificent golden carved iconostasis, the shimmering screen which hid the mysteries of the sanctuary until the
priest emerged from the Royal Doors carrying the blood and body of Christ. The iconostasis held four tiers of icons, splendid with gold leaf and jewels, and between the sacred pictures the native wood-carvers had allowed their imagination to create a fantasy of twining vines and mythical birds and beasts perched in the lacy fretwork.

The most sacred object in the church was the silken
antimin
on the altar table, with the death of Christ embroidered on it and the bone of a saint sewn into its lining. It was this cloth which the Chams set alight. Thanks to the kerosene they spilled, the flames climbed swiftly to the top tier of the iconostasis, making the sinuous vines and animals come alive. The flickering light was reflected in the saints’ eyes and on the face of the Pantocrator, but the only living witness to the magnificent final spectacle was the German commandant.

Convinced that the church would burn nicely, he set out toward the starting point of his promenade, where he found a number of his men gathered around an old woman in black who was struggling in the grasp of two Chams.

The commandant had decided not to send his men into the upper village for fear partisans were still hiding there and he had satisfied himself that all of the middle and lower village was burning. But he felt disappointed that no prisoner had been taken from this serpents’ nest of rebels whom he could use as an example.

The two Chams were getting tired of holding Anastasia as she flapped and screeched. For the onlookers the joke had lost its interest. The Chams glanced at the commandant and he gave a small nod. They picked up the old woman like a doll and tossed her through one of the now empty windows. The floor was gone and she fell directly into the flames of the cellar as a long wordless scream came from her mouth that raised the hairs on the arms of the listeners in Kostana. Tassina heard it and felt an answering pain start at her sides and travel toward the center of her abdomen. She realized that her time had come early, and felt warm liquid flowing down her legs.

The commandant ordered his men to assemble. There was nothing more to be accomplished here. They marched through the village and left, heading southeast toward the rise of St. Marina, where the Gatzoyiannis family was hiding.

On the far side of the ridge dedicated to Marina, the martyred saint of the grape harvest, the Gatzoyiannis family watched their sheep and goats graze while Fotini and Nikola played in the dry riverbed. They were too far away to hear Anastasia Haidis’ screams, but the barrage of German gunfire shocked them into a fearful silence. They sat, scarcely daring to move, waiting.

After a few minutes there was an exclamation from Nitsa, and everyone
looked into the sky where a delicate finger of smoke was rising. “They’re burning the village!” Megali blurted out. She began to cry and Eleni put her arms around her.

“I’m going to the top of St. Marina to see what’s happening,” said Kitso Haidis.

“I’m going with you, Father,” Eleni said quickly. At once Glykeria and Kanta begged to go too.

Reluctantly Eleni said that Kanta could come if she stayed behind her, ready to run. To ten-year-old Glykeria she said, “You know you’re as slow as a tortoise! You’d get us all caught.”

Andreas, afraid to stay, afraid to go, finally decided they needed his military expertise to assess the situation properly. After warning Megali, Nitsa and Olga to stay close to the little ones and keep the animals quiet, Eleni, Kitso, Andreas and Kanta climbed out of the sandy riverbed up the rise toward St. Marina.

On the other side the German battalion approached from the direction of Lia. Scouts were running ahead, searching every gully for signs of partisans. Just as the main body was coming down out of the mountains near a spot called the Little Springs, an advance patrol surprised two young men from Lia. They were part of a group who had concealed themselves in the foothills, but these two men, Gregori Lollis and Vasili Stoungas, were caught as they were leading nearly forty sheep and goats up a hill to graze. The advance patrol brought them at gunpoint to the commandant. At almost the same moment another patrol arrived, dragging a middle-aged tinker, Yiorgi Billis, who had walked right into them. He was indignantly waving a pass stamped by the German authority in Yannina. The Chams translated his protests, but the German officer listened without interest.

The three men couldn’t keep their eyes off the sight high above them of their village in flames. The commandant told them through an interpreter that he was going to ask them one question; their survival would depend on how they answered it. Were there any partisans hiding in the foothills around them? The captives looked at one another, then in unison began making vigorous gestures of denial. “All the partisans are up in the mountains,” said Gregori Lollis.

The Germans let the man with the pass go, but the commandant decided to take Lollis and Stoungas as far as the next village, Kostana, to check their identities. Their hands were tied behind them and they were pushed along the road at the head of the batallion, their flocks left behind.

Yiorgi Billis, the tinker with the pass from Yannina, was still in sight, walking quickly away, when a sound came from the foothills that froze everyone in mid-step—the pop of two faraway rifle shots. The Germans took cover on either side of the road. The commandant snapped an order and several Chams ran after Yiorgi Billis, who was standing in a daze, looking from the Germans behind him to the spot where he had seen puffs of smoke. By the time he started to run, they were on top of him.

Two ELAS guerrillas from the Skevis group had impetuously fired the shots that would cost the lives of three of their fellow villagers. At the first shot a shepherd who was hiding below them and could see what they could not, shouted, “Hold your fire, boys! They have hostages!” But it was too late.