Eleni (33 page)

In each house, in the room nearly filled by the great loom and piled high with rainbow stacks of
velenzes
, Eleni expertly felt the weight of the rugs, stroked the pile, examined the underside for flaws and asked questions about the dyes. Each woman would give a price—so many drachmas per kilo—and when Eleni and Olga left the house, they would run after them, offering to lower the price by a few drachmas a kilo. But this was only the first day; too soon to buy.

On the second morning, mother and daughter returned to the home of a woman whose rugs, Eleni had decided, were of the best workmanship. Cups of coffee appeared from nowhere. “Feel the pile,
Kyria
,” the woman crooned. “Only the flower of the wool. Not an ounce from the underbelly
or legs. The dyes will still be as bright when this beautiful bride has grandchildren.”

The prize of her collection was a bridal
velenza
—the rug which goes over the saddle of the mule carrying the dowry—woven in multicolored, elaborate geometries “with a silver flywheel.” Olga fell in love with it, but Eleni managed to appear unimpressed.

After they got up to leave twice, and twice were physically dragged back into the house, Eleni and the Vlach woman settled on a compromise price which was fair enough to convince both parties they had outwitted the other. There were other things to buy: a large striped mattress, a bright flowered quilt for winter nights, a pair of pillows, and some geometrically patterned bed covers. The night of the second day in Yannina, Olga and Eleni slept the sleep of victorious warriors.

Before hiring a truck to carry their treasures back to Vrosina, Eleni, Olga and Andreas stopped for a last meal at the Yiali Kafene. As they were halfway through a plate of trout and crayfish fresh from the lake, there was a commotion. From their table they could see a crowd of peasants in village dress excitedly waiting for something. When two open army trucks rolled down Venizelos Street and came to a stop, the crowd erupted into wails and screams.

The trucks were jammed with young women, no older than Olga, who were also weeping, their faces scratched, their hair snarled and untidy and uncovered by kerchiefs. Eleni got up to see what was happening, but Olga was more interested in her first taste of fish and stayed behind with Andreas. After some time Eleni returned to their table, her face drawn.

“It’s a group of girls from villages in the Pogoni area,” she said, referring to a region fifty miles northwest of Yannina. “Two months ago they were taken by force by the guerrillas and made to put on uniforms and fight. Those outside are some of the girls that managed to flee to the national army.” She looked at Olga. Like her daughter, the
andartinas
were only children, but they had eyes like old women. “You should see how the parents cried when they saw them,” she said. “The worst was the parents of daughters who didn’t come back.”

Olga took little interest in the fate of the unwilling girl soldiers, except to notice with fascination that some of them wore khaki trousers, which shocked her more than the fact that they had been kidnapped from their villages. Olga was lost in anticipation of her triumphant return to Lia with the new dowry, but Eleni couldn’t get the girls’ faces out of her mind. The pitiful reunion with their parents was proof that Minas Stratis had been right in his predictions. And even he had not told her the
andartes
would conscript girls. What if they tried to take her own daughters? But Christos had given strict orders not to leave the house. In the back of the truck all the way to Vrosina, where they had left the donkey, Eleni turned over this new threat in her mind.

For Olga, the aftermath of the trip to Yannina was like an endless
name-day celebration. Every female in Lia dropped by to examine the new dowry piled on top of the trunk, to feel the pile of the
velenzes
, exclaim over the workmanship, sip tiny glasses of ouzo or coffee, and offer good wishes for her future engagement.

Stavroula Yakou came and the Gatzoyiannis girls were especially solicitous of her, for her little son had been born dead some months before. Stavroula no longer moved with the same careless grace, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Like everyone else, she exclaimed over the magnificent dowry and uttered the conventional wish, “May the marriage be well rooted,” but as she spoke, Olga felt an involuntary shudder. Stavroula was looking at her as a caged canary watches a passing swallow.

In later years, every time Olga thought of her dowry, she’d sigh and say, “I only had three months to enjoy it.” For by the end of November the tide of war would carry the guerrilla force back to Lia, and celebrations of the ordinary ceremonies of life would be ended forever.

While Olga was buying her dowry in Yannina, the DAG of Markos Vafiadis was concentrating its strength in the Zagoria villages to the north of Yannina. After an unsuccessful late-October attack on Metsovo, the town thirty-five miles northeast of Yannina that was the gateway to the only route over the Pindos mountains, the
andartes
withdrew to sanctuaries on the Pindos massif. It seemed likely that the men in the Epiros Command of the DAG would spend the winter on the Pindos range, launching occasional raids to the south and east. But in late November, under cover of thick fog, six battalions unexpectedly left the Pindos chain and moved westward with the objective of cutting Epiros in half along an east-west axis.

This force of 1,500 guerrillas intended to base themselves in the rugged Mourgana mountain range that extends along the Greek-Albanian border where Lia was located. They could hold this natural fortress easily with a small force and would have access to Albania, to bring in supplies and evacuate the wounded. From the Mourgana the guerrillas hoped to expand south into Epiros, capture a major town there and set up a provisional government as their first step toward recapturing control of Greece.

On November 27, 1947, the six constables stationed in Lia received word from their headquarters in Filiates that the guerrilla forces were approaching. They were ordered to take all the weapons and important papers they could carry, hide the rest and evacuate to Filiates at once. The constables moved fast—they had heard about the mutilated bodies of gendarmes in other invaded villages. While two of them dug a hole in the corner of a field behind the police station, screened by a hedge and a shed, the others ran to warn the few men in the village who belonged to MAY—the auxiliary security unit of villagers who helped the police. In Lia there were not many rightists willing to work with the gendarmes against the guerrillas; Andreas Kyrkas was one of them. On that Thursday, the constables woke him from
his siesta, telling him to come help them pack the police files and then to get himself to Filiates before he was caught and executed.

As two constables hurriedly buried a cache of weapons behind the police station, they looked up to see the thin, sunburned, sardonic face of seventeen-year-old Andreas Michopoulos, hovering over them from atop the wall that separated the police station from the house that had been the British commando headquarters. Andreas Michopoulos was the bad egg among the boys of Lia, the one always suspected if someone’s apricot tree had been stripped or a flock stampeded by a well-aimed rock. “He’s a devil!” Andreas’ mother often said, crossing herself. “I can break the broomstick beating him one day and the next he’ll get in worse trouble.”

The constables were not happy to find Andreas watching them bury the guns. The young troublemaker could be counted on to reveal the hiding place to the guerrillas just for spite.

“You’d better come along with us to Filiates, Andreas!” called the sergeant, motioning to the boy to come out from behind the wall. “You’re just the right age for the guerrillas to conscript you the minute they lay eyes on you.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Andreas replied casually.

“Better come with us,” the sergeant repeated more firmly. “Otherwise we’d have to report in Filiates that you insisted on staying behind to help the guerrillas.”

Andreas wasn’t willing to risk going to jail, so he shrugged, and with obvious reluctance, set out with the constables toward the west.

The activity at the police station had spread to the whole village, electrified by the news that the guerrillas were practically in town. Some Liotes were delighted that they were returning, but many former ELAS supporters prepared to flee alongside the terrified rightists because they didn’t want to be conscripted.

In the town square Spiro Michopoulos, the thin, pale bachelor who ran the
cafenion
, was surprised to see his rebellious nephew Andreas, who shared his own admiration for the
andartes
, leaving town in the company of the constables. Spiro went over to investigate and realized that Andreas was not leaving entirely by choice. “You should come along too, Spiro,” the sergeant told the shopowner. “The guerrillas are conscripting anything that moves.”

Spiro grinned. “They’re not so hard up they’ll take me,” he said, joking about his near-fatal brush with tuberculosis, which had left him a semi-invalid. “Besides, I don’t dare leave the store. It’s full of goods, and they’ll clean it out if I’m not here to keep an eye on everything. They’ll be gone in a few days, anyway.”

When Tassina Bartzokis came running into her house with the news of the approaching guerrillas, Eleni thought immediately of the weeping
andartinas
she had seen in Yannina. For herself, there was no choice; her husband
had ordered her not to leave the house no matter what happened, but she wondered frantically if there was some way to save the children. She knew that Olga, now nineteen, and Kanta, who was fifteen, might be taken by force. Instinctively she headed down the mountain toward her father’s house. She was so used to turning to a man for advice in a crisis that now, in her fear, she had forgotten the last bitter exchange between them.

When Eleni reached her parents’ house, she found Megali alone, crouched in a corner, starting at every sound. “He’s gone, Eleni,” she whimpered. “He left with Foto Gatzoyiannis and a crowd of other men for Filiates. He told me to stay here, that the
andartes
won’t hurt women, but I’m afraid!”

She could hardly believe that her father had left without a goodbye, even though Christos had charged him with her family’s safety. Kitso had turned his back on her as emphatically as she had threatened to do to him. He had left her helpless and her children in danger.

Eleni felt she was in a dark room; a room with many doors, and behind each door was a crack of light. Her father had shut one door on her, but, she thought quickly, there was still her brother-in-law Andreas. She hurried toward his house and found him outside the police station, loading a mule with boxes of files. “Take Olga and Kanta with you when you leave,” she begged him. “I’m afraid of what the
andartes
will do to them!” She paused. “I want you to take Nikola too,” she added. “It won’t be safe for him if they start fighting here. I’ll keep Glykeria and Fotini so they won’t think I’ve sent all my children away.”

Andreas looked at her nervously, then went back to tying bags full of police files onto the mule’s back. “I’ll take all of you or nobody!” he said. “It’s no good having half the family down there in Filiates, worrying about you and the rest up here.”

“But Christos told me not to leave the house!” Eleni cried. “If we all flee, they’ll burn it, but they wouldn’t hurt a woman and two little girls!”

Andreas nodded, relieved at finding an excuse not to be burdened with the children. “You’re right. Keep all the children inside while they’re here and they won’t bother you. But if I don’t leave now, I’m a dead man.” He slapped the mule’s flank, and as Eleni watched her brother-in-law head off through the village square, the second door closed.

She took a shortcut up the mountain and over toward the Perivoli. On the way she caught up with Tassos Bartzokis, who was just returning from a trip to Yannina. Learning that the guerrillas were almost on top of them, he was rushing home to pick up some changes of clothes and join the exodus of men for Filiates. Tassos, like Eleni, knew that young girls had been conscripted by force in other villages. He feared that his sister-in-law Rano was a likely victim as well as her friends, the two elder daughters of Eleni Gatzoyiannis. “Get Olga and Kanta ready,” Tassos said as soon as he saw her on the path. “I’m leaving right now and I’ll take Rano and your two girls too.”

A door swung unexpectedly open and flooded Eleni with light. When the
Germans came, Tassos had looked after her along with his own family. He had brought them sweets from Albania in the worst of the famine, and now he was offering her salvation once again. “That’s something my own father didn’t say to me,” she told him with emotion.

“Go home and get them,” said Tassos urgently. “I’m going to the house to get Rano, and I’ll meet you there.”

Eleni ran ahead, but the closer she got to the house, the more she remembered what Christos had written her: “You have no business going anywhere … stay in your home with your children …”

She slowed down to a walk. What would Christos, not to mention all the villagers, say if they learned she had sent the eldest girls away with a man who was not a relative? Olga and Kanta shouldn’t even speak to Tassos, much less travel all night alone with him. By the time she reached the house, Eleni knew she couldn’t send them, no matter how good a friend Tassos was. She turned off to the Bartzokis house, where she found Tassos throwing things into a sack.

“I’ll always be grateful that you offered to take the girls, Tassos,” she said, “but I’ve decided not to send them away. I’ll hide them around here somewhere until the guerrillas leave.”

Hearing this, Rano decided she’d stay too. Olga Gatzoyiannis was her best friend; they could hide out together, she said. Besides, she didn’t want to leave her sister alone, because she was pregnant again. Tassos did not waste time arguing with their decision. He set off at once, almost running to catch up with the village men who had gone before. Eleni had closed the third door herself because of her fear of what people would say.