Eleni (25 page)

The tinker, Yiorgi Billis, was dragged back to where the other two captives stood. He screamed that he was innocent, he had been away for six months; how could he know there were partisans in the foothills? He didn’t stop screaming until the German commandant slapped him.

Out of rifle range of the hidden partisans, the Germans continued on their way, pushing the captives ahead of them. The commandant had three more Liotes to make an example of, and he intended to execute them in the churchyard at Kostana with every person in the village watching.

Eleni, Kitso, Andreas and Kanta, who were halfway up the other side of the ridge, stopped and looked at one another when they heard the
andartes’
two rifle shots.

“Why are they shooting?” asked Kitso. “They sound far away.”

Andreas was visibly trembling. “It’s a bad sign,” he said. “They’re withdrawing this way. We’ve got to go back!”

“Let’s just go high enough to see what’s on fire in the village,” said Eleni.

Andreas’ legs wouldn’t move and his shirt was drenched with sweat. He felt just as he had in 1921 in Turkey when the Greek soldiers threw down their guns and fled into the swamps.

“You do what you want,” he shouted at the others. “I’m going back!” He turned and stalked down the incline toward the camp, trying not to run.

Eleni took Kanta’s hand and continued slowly up the ridge to the point where the mountainside, with Lia huddled in the large cleft, came slowly into view. She stopped, horrified. The whole lower half of the village was obscured by smoke, and the Church of the Virgin was a torch.

Her father came abreast of her, squinting into the distance; then his eyes picked out the gaping hole that had been his house, and with a cry he fell to his knees. Great, painful sobs exploded from him and like some rabid animal he dug in the dirt with his hands. Kanta was more frightened by her grandfather’s behavior than the sight of the burning village. His loss of control terrified her, and she ran up the hill to get away from the sound of his grief. When she arrived at the top of the ridge, the girl looked down and suddenly clapped her hands over her mouth. Eleni hurried to her side.

Below them were more Germans than Kanta thought the world contained; their helmets and gun barrels reflecting the sunlight so that her eyes watered, a river of marching men flowing straight toward her. She stared, paralyzed, until her mother wrenched her by the shoulder and pulled her flat on the ground.

At the sight of the German army Kitso turned and waved frantically at Andreas, who stood watching from the bottom of the ridge. The old man began to run down so fast that his feet slipped out from under him and he
rolled to the bottom of the hill. Andreas needed only a glimpse of Kitso’s frantic retreat to know that his worst fears had come true—the Germans were upon them. He took off like a mountain goat, shouting, as he crashed through the group in the riverbed, “The Germans are behind me!” Hardly slowing his pace, he scooped Nikola up from his sand castles and continued running.

Olga dropped the spoon she was using to stir the rice pudding and pulled Fotini in the same direction. Glykeria ran after Andreas too. Megali and Nitsa had become so frantic they were going in circles, gathering up blankets and then dropping them.

Everyone followed Andreas toward a wooded area, not realizing it took them closer to Kostana. He finally stopped among the trees near a large boulder and the girls collapsed beside him. As Megali puffed up, holding her blankets, Olga found her voice: “What did you see, Uncle? Where are the rest?”

“The Germans were close enough to bite us!” he panted. “Your mother and grandfather deserve what happens to them for going up that rise.”

The girls and Nikola started to cry, and the sound attracted the missing members of the family, who were searching for them. The food and the animals had been left behind at the dry riverbed, but the family huddled together under the boulder like hens hiding from the shadow of the hawk.

Kanta described the huge army of Germans over and over again, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. When she stopped, Eleni said quietly to her father, “Did you see that they had captured three men? I recognized Gregori Lollis and the Stoungas boy.” Kitso bit his lower lip and shook his head in a gesture that meant there was no hope for them. Eleni thought of Gregori’s pregnant wife and wondered if she knew her husband had been taken by the Germans.

No one spoke of the burned village, but Megali wept all night, a nasal drone. Kitso didn’t even bother to make her stop. He seemed far away in his thoughts. The children cried too because they were cold and hungry, but they huddled together for warmth and eventually slept.

Sometime in the night I awoke, feeling the warmth of my mother’s side against my cheek. It was the beginning of an earthquake that had roused me, a rhythmic trembling of the earth. It formed itself into the sound of marching feet. The Germans were passing so close to us that if I opened my eyelids a crack I could see the shapes of their boots. There were guttural shouts in a language I couldn’t understand. Although I didn’t know it then, they were on their way from Kostana, heading southeast toward Igoumenitsa, having finished with the executions of their hostages.

I felt my mother’s hand tight over my mouth, but it wasn’t necessary; I didn’t have the strength to move or make a sound. I could feel the
shuddering of her body and the thud of her heartbeat, as quick as my own. Automatically, to make the fear go away and to protect us, I silently began to repeat the evening prayer that she had taught me, the four-line poem that every Greek child says before going to sleep: “I kneel and cross myself / Arms for battle at my side / God’s servant, they call me / And I fear nothing.”

It didn’t work. I was so afraid I could taste it; a steely bitterness on my tongue. The thing that frightened me most was not the Germans, passing yards from where we were hidden, but the convulsive trembling of my mother. In the house at Kostana, she had laid my fears to rest with her calm decision to go about ordinary tasks as if things were indeed normal. But that night when the German army passed by, I discovered that there were things so powerful and so evil that even my mother couldn’t make them go away. She was as terrified as I was and there was nowhere to turn for protection. That night remains the most vivid memory of my early childhood.

The next morning while everyone was still marveling at their hair’s-breadth escape from the Germans, Kitso Haidis could think of nothing but getting back to Lia. He was obsessed with seeing the ruins of his house. Eleni, Andreas and Kanta, the better walkers of the group, decided to go ahead with him, leaving the rest to gather the animals and herd them up the mountains.

By the time the four reached the outskirts of Lia, it was already afternoon. They were among the first to return to the burned-out village. The hallucinatory feeling of seeing something so familiar completely changed increased as they walked on. A few old women scratched about in the smoking ashes of what had been their homes, occasionally digging up a usable object and putting it aside. The Haidis house was almost the last on the western edge of Lia, and they approached it with dread. Because the path wound around the mountain at a point several yards above the roof level of Kitso’s house, they could see from a distance that only the wall which divided his half from that of Anastasia Haidis was still standing. Eleni started to cry as soon as she saw the burned-out shell, but Kitso ashamed of his previous weakness, steeled himself to look at it without emotion. On the day the house was completed in 1895 and the cornerstone put in place, Kitso was fifteen years old. His father had built it as a monument to the Haidis family just as a church is a tribute in stone to the saint whose name it bears.

Kitso and his two brothers had loaded the gray-pink granite for the walls from high on the mountain onto the mules and carried the dark gray sheets of slate for the roof from the lowland riverbanks on their own backs. The women of the family whitewashed the inner walls with lime and the most skilled stone carver was hired to cut the two-headed eagles, the cypresses and rosettes on the four faces of the fireplaces. The hyacinths on the wooden
rosetta
in the center of the ceiling and the acantha leaves on the cornices were done by wood-carvers from Metsovo. A veranda draped with grape vines stretched around three sides of the house and in its shade Kitso had watched nearly every sunset of his life.

When he became its master after his father’s death, Kitso always celebrated the house’s nameday—St. Athanassios—with even more splendor than his own. He brought his bride to its door, and in its good chamber he put four infant daughters in their coffins. Kitso took more pride in that house than in any mill he ever built, and now it was gone. Every room had been fragrant with memories, just as the holy water and sweet basil scattered by the priest scented each corner on the day it was consecrated.

Kitso knew, as he looked at the ashes of his father’s dream, that eventually he would build another house, but he promised himself never to build one that could leave such a wound on his heart.

Eleni wiped her tears away with her apron and tied the mule at the gate to the courtyard. She told Kanta to sit at the threshold of the gate and not to come any closer, while the others examined the wreckage.

Kanta was tired from the long walk but much less upset than the adults at the loss of her grandfather’s house and belongings. After all, their own house was intact—they had seen that from the ridge of St. Marina. As she sat and watched the shadows lengthen, Kanta heard what sounded like Anastasia Haidis’ voice, raised in the shrill ululating village cry, calling the name of her small grandson from somewhere down the hill: “Ooohhh, Fotooouu!” After a while Eleni returned to where Kanta was sitting and said that no one could find Anastasia, only the bullet-riddled carcass of one of her goats halfway up the ravine, the solitary victim of the ELAS guerrillas’ ill-advised fire on the Germans.

“She’s down there somewhere,” said Kanta, pointing. “I heard her calling Fotis.”

Andreas went down the ravine to hunt for the old woman. Eleni looked to see if she was at the Petsis house next door, but found it, too, in ashes. Kanta stayed where she was, feeling uneasy as the light faded. She heard the tapping of a cane and slow, shuffling steps coming down the hill just in front of her. Soon the bent figure of the blind woman, Sophia Karapanou, came into view.

“Over here,
Yiayia!”
called Kanta, and the woman turned chalky blue eyes, clouded with cataracts, in her direction. She tottered over and put her hand on Kanta’s head, then carefully sat down on the stone beside her.

“Everybody’s looking for
Yiayia
Anastasia,” said Kanta. “I heard her calling from down in the ravine.”

“She’s not in the ravine, she’s in the house,” replied the old woman.

“But the house is gone,” Kanta explained patiently to the blind woman. “The Germans burned it, and half the village, and the school and the Church of the Virgin too!”

“I know,” Sophia replied. “They burned Anastasia too. They threw her into the house. Name of God, how she screamed!”

Kanta felt sick. “But I heard her just now! I heard her voice.”

“You may well have heard her, but that was her soul calling,” the old woman went on. “She’s not at peace, the way she died. She’s a vampire wandering. You need to get her a priest.”

Kanta did not budge, but when her mother and grandfather returned, she told them what the blind woman had said. They turned toward the ruins of the house, but it was still smoking and darkness was setting in.

In the twilight the rest of their group arrived with the animals. Megali nearly fell off the donkey when she saw what was left of her house. They had to carry her, weeping and invoking the saints, up the hill to Eleni’s house.

It seemed incredible to find their own house unchanged after all that had happened. Eleni went immediately to the hollow oak in the backyard and found her treasures still inside. The goats bleated with joy at seeing their usual quarters. Megali was laid gently on a pile of
velenzes
near the fireplace and eventually fell asleep, but Kitso refused to come in. No one knew where he spent the night.

The next morning the boy Fotis Haidis returned from the Agora with his mother and joined in the search for his grandmother. It was Fotis who spied a gold signet ring shining from beneath a pile of fallen rocks in the still-smoking cellar. In the ring was a bone.

They lifted the rocks, blistering their hands, and found more bones and the silver cross she had always worn. Some of her hair still clung to the back of her skull. Someone found a piece of cloth and they gathered the bits of bone and teeth in it. As they worked, the women began to wail the death songs, and the keening sound brought neighbors, who joined in, pouring out their grief for their burned houses along with the lament for old Anastasia, who was not allowed to die as befitted her years.

The funeral procession began to wind up the path toward the Church of St. Demetrios. They passed Sophia, who stood at her gate with a look of contentment on her blind face and made the sign of the cross as they passed. Soon her friend would be at peace.

Outside St. Demetrios the mourners encountered a handful of
andartes
, including Spiro Skevis and Mitsi Bollis, descending from the mountaintops. The guerrillas stopped at the sight of the funeral procession, but the mourners stopped too, facing them. None of the villagers spoke, but their eyes eloquently laid the blame for the death of four innocents at their feet.

“Well, we scared them away, didn’t we?” blurted Mitsi Bollis in the tense silence.

No one answered.

Eight days later Tassina returned to Lia on a mule, carrying her new son, who would be christened Haralambos. His birth had begun with Anastasia’s death cry. Eleni learned how he was born in the little room near Kostana without even clean rags to swaddle him, but the child was healthy and
would live. Eleni believed that his birth on the day the village burned must be a sign from God that a new beginning would rise from the ashes.