Eleni (37 page)

By the time Sotiris threw down his shovel in disgust, Sioli had finished off most of the kid and, his belt loosened, was dozing happily by the fire. Sotiri had spent a wasted afternoon and found nothing, but Eleni had learned that someone in the village wished her ill. The familiar faces of her neighbors would never look the same again.

Perhaps Sioli Skevis told his son Spiro about the Amerikana’s plight, or perhaps Spiro took a notion to strengthen his ties with a family that carried so much influence in the village. The commander of the battalion appeared at the Gatzoyiannis gate some days after the Sotiris incident, led on horseback up the steep path to the Perivoli by his orderly, who stood smartly at attention holding the reins as Spiro dismounted. Now his face was clean-shaven, his uniform pressed, his manner altogether different from the grim exaltation on the day Eleni heard him tell his men that they were going to squeeze his native village dry.

Kanta, working in the vegetable patch, stared in astonishment at the magnificent figure entering their gate. She recognized him at once, for he had been her substitute teacher in the second grade whenever Minas Stratis had to be away. Spiro remembered her too, even though she was now a young woman of fifteen. As she murmured “Good day” and lowered her head, not looking at him directly, he said, “You’re Alexandra, aren’t you? You were one of my best students.”

She looked down again.

“We need smart girls in the movement,” he went on with a teasing smile. “I’m going to find you a captain to marry. How would you like that?”

“I’m too young to get married,
effendi
,” she said, looking at his boots.

“In a couple of years, then,” he replied. “You’d like a handsome young captain, wouldn’t you?”

Kanta’s sense of irony got the better of her. “Oh, it’d be fine if your army wins the war!” she said. “But if you lose, the captain would probably end up herding sheep.”

“Don’t worry, we’re going to win,” he said cheerfully. “Look out there.” He gestured, indicating the mountains rimming the bowl of the foothills below. “You see Velouna, Plokista and Taverra?” he said, sweeping the horizon from east to west. “Our men have taken all of them. The fascists are melting away before us like spring ice. Soon we’ll have the whole country. Your young captain might end up a minister in government instead of a shepherd.” He looked at her intently. “I think you have an older sister, don’t you?”

Kanta didn’t answer. She knew Olga was hiding in the pantry with her kerchief over her face.

“You should tell your sister to marry,” Spiro said, not smiling now. “With your father in America, she needs some kind of protection.”

Eleni had come out of the house to greet their noted visitor and heard the remark. She hurried forward, inviting Spiro into the house and summoning Olga from the pantry to prepare a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and some sweets for the major. When Olga brought the tray into the large chamber, she saw that Eleni had handed Spiro the last letter that Christos sent, the one that said she mustn’t leave the house under any circumstances, and that the
andartes
were “fellow villagers, fighting for their rights.” Olga saw that Spiro was chuckling. He muttered, “Christos, you old rogue!” and then looked up at Eleni and said, “I never realized he was with us.”

Eleni smiled and said nothing but motioned for Olga to bring the coffee over. The girl left the room as soon as she had served it. No one heard what Eleni and Spiro talked about after that, but Kanta noticed that when Skevis left the house and remounted his horse, he was whistling.

Several days after Skevis’ visit, the village was electrified by the sight of a long ragged file of women guerrillas, perhaps a hundred in all, climbing down from the peak of the Prophet Elias, making their way through the Perivoli with
andartes
at their front and back, and two guarding the sides. The group of
andartinas
passed right outside the Gatzoyiannis gate, marching in step, guns on their backs, paying no attention to the excited buzz of the villagers who flocked to stare at them.

All the Gatzoyiannis children rushed to see them, even Olga, who hadn’t left the house since the guerrillas arrived. The
andartinas
were peasant girls in their teens and twenties, with long, thick braids down their backs, but below the braids were khaki uniforms complete with—the villagers could scarcely believe it—men’s trousers! If they had been marching naked, it couldn’t have caused more of a sensation. Nikola was mystified, thinking the soldiers were half man and half woman. None of the Gatzoyiannis children would ever forget their first sight of women in pants.

But Eleni scarcely noticed what the girls were wearing. She was searching their faces, thinking of the weeping villagers she had seen in Yannina.

Just below the Gatzoyiannis house the women were called to a halt by their male officers, who ordered them to fall out and rest in the yards of several houses, including that of Tassina Bartzokis. Eleni shooed her children back inside and hurried down to where her neighbors were drawing water for the
andartinas
to drink.

They lay on the ground with a lethargy that suggested deep exhaustion. Eleni sat down in the grass near a group who looked no older than Olga. She moved over next to a girl with the round face of a child and asked her name. The girl replied listlessly, adding that she was from the village of Vatsounia.

“You seem so young,” Eleni persisted. “Aren’t you afraid? I have two girls about your age. If they want to join the army, I don’t think I could let them go. Your mother must be so worried!”

The girl turned black-rimmed eyes on her for the first time. “Do you think my mother had a choice?” she said.

“They took you by force?” Eleni asked. “All these girls?”

“All the girls over fifteen, the unmarried ones,” the girl whispered. “Now go away! If they see us talking, they’ll kill you and me both.”

As soon as the women soldiers were ordered to move on, Eleni ran back to her house. Now she understood what Spiro Skevis meant when he said that Olga should be married for her protection.

Eleni called Olga and Kanta into the kitchen and when she looked at their faces, she started to cry. “They’re going to take you! I knew it!” she wept. “Why didn’t you leave when I sent you to Babouri! What will happen to you now?”

The girls looked at her, bewildered. Soon Tassina Bartzokis burst in, also in tears. As soon as she saw Olga she cried, “I’d rather see you and Rano drown yourselves in the irrigation pool than have you taken like those poor girls!”

Eleni and her daughters sat up all night, trying to formulate a plan to save them from being conscripted. Eleni couldn’t stop remembering the faces of the
andartinas
and imagining her two daughters, who had never spoken to a strange man, being forced to wear trousers, sleep side by side with the guerrillas and fight for their lives on the battlefield. By dawn she was pale but calm. “Go get Rano,” she told them. “We’ll hide you where they’ll never find you. Soon they’ll leave and you’ll be safe.”

The place she had decided on was the Kastro, crowning one of the two peaks above the village, where an ancient acropolis had stood three hundred years before Christ. It was built as a fortress by a race of blond-haired, blue-eyed, wide-browed Dorians as a sanctuary where the inhabitants of the settlements below could retreat when threatened by enemy attack. Here they slaughtered bulls and prayed to Zeus for protection, and here, a hundred years ago, archeologists thought they had found the ruins of the
Oracle of Dodona before they settled on another site, sixty-three miles to the south.

It took little more than an hour, climbing straight up past the timberline, to reach the Kastro. The acropolis was originally surrounded by a high wall, and on the far side the precipice fell straight down, impossible for anyone to ascend. But if a climber lowered himself, hand over hand, fifty feet down, clinging to the rocks and shrubs, he would find a natural balcony which the ancients reinforced with a small wall, where lookouts could see for miles, making a surprise attack from the north impossible.

This tiny outcrop on the sheer northern face of the cliff had become so overgrown with scrub pine that no one would know it was there. Olga, Kanta and Rano slid over the top and let themselves down into it, rigid with fear, not looking down, knowing that a slip could send them hurtling into the depths below. Wedged into the little balcony, barely large enough for the three of them, they were invisible. Rano insisted that if the guerrillas came for them, she would throw herself over the side as the Souliote women had to escape the Turks. Olga said Rano was crazy. Kanta said she was hungry and cold.

At night the wind screamed around their perch. The air was like ice water, and the rustlings and howlings from the ancient fortress walls over their heads reminded Kanta of the fearful ghosts she had been told lived in the ruins. Far below them, hawks and crows wheeled, watching the chasm where a stream glimmered like the scratch of a silver hairpin in the green.

They huddled together there for three days, sleeping sitting up, their backs against the cliff wall, their legs chafed by the underbrush. They couldn’t get out, even to relieve themselves, for the rock balcony was their whole world.

Every day either Glykeria or Angeliki climbed up the height of the Kastro, and after a shout to make sure the fugitives were still there, tossed down bread and cheese wrapped in a cloth. The three girls had blankets to warm themselves, but their lips were blue, and the drifting snowflakes froze on their eyelashes. They cried and talked about what their families at home were probably eating and how warm it would be by the fire. Finally Kanta rebelled. “Let them take me!” she exclaimed, her voice sailing into the great silence below. “It’s better than freezing to death!” And without another word she started climbing up, hand over hand, clinging to projecting rocks and shrubs. Even though she was the youngest, Kanta’s defection drained Olga and Rano’s courage, and they began to climb up after her.

When it was dark, Kanta crept back to her mother’s house and knocked softly at the back door. As soon as Eleni saw her, she pulled her inside. “They’ve come around asking for both of you,” she said. “They have a list with names. I said you were away in the fields with the flocks. You can’t come home now!”

She paced up and down the narrow hall, then she remembered another
hiding place: the pit in Rano’s backyard. It was a large hole that the family had dug during the occupation to hide trunks of valuables in case the Germans took the village. After the war the trunks had been dug up, but the pit remained and now was so overgrown that it was nearly invisible.

The three girls crawled into the hole, only a hundred yards from the Gatzoyiannis gate, and Eleni fortified them with more blankets and a pan of spicy boiled lentils. At first it seemed much better: they were protected from the wind, and the heat of their bodies would provide the warmth they needed.

They argued about who would sit in the middle and agreed to change places every few hours. They stayed awake telling ghost stories and gossiping about other girls in the village, but finally they fell asleep, and it began to rain. Even though the December drizzle did not form snow at this altitude, it seemed colder than on the peak of the Kastro. The hole smelled like a tomb, and in the night, slimy things crawled over their feet, leaving iridescent trails that shone in the light of dawn. They felt their resolution eroding. They were children, and all they wanted was home.

Two days were passed inside the pit, but on the second night when Glykeria came by with their evening meal, they begged her to ask Eleni for a better hiding place. Kanta complained that her feet had become like wood. She couldn’t stand up if she tried. They were tired of being buried alive.

Soon Eleni appeared, standing over the hole, holding a pan that held the promise of meat. She told the girls she had found them a warm hiding place and took them to the cellar-stable of Vangeli Botsaris, two houses up from her own, inhabited by three gentle-eyed goats who stared at them quizzically as they burrowed their legs into the manure heap which radiated warmth. They didn’t even notice the smell—they had been living too long with the odor of their own unwashed bodies.

It was far better than the Kastro and the pit, but the three girls spent only a day and a night there, their sleep punctuated by the coughing of the goats, until Eleni came running up, her hair flying loose from her kerchief, crying that the girls had to come at once or they’d all be shot. “They said I had to produce you or I’d die.”

Olga and Kanta hurried home and scrubbed off the manure as best they could. Eleni washed, brushed and braided Olga’s hair as she had when she was a little girl. Because Olga was the first-born, Eleni worried more about her than about the others. When Olga was a baby, Eleni used to get up and light a lamp and watch her lying in the wooden cradle, her tiny hands closed, her lips working, dreaming of the breast. Eleni had a horror of smothering the baby while she slept and would only nurse her sitting up. According to whispers she had heard, her own second sister, for whom Olga was named, died when Megali rolled over in her sleep on top of the infant.

Olga had always been spoiled and coddled, and now she was to be taken as a soldier. She had entered puberty at fourteen, and her body had the curves of a woman, while Kanta, now fifteen, still hadn’t matured and was
small for her years. Olga slept like the dead—who knows what the guerrillas might do to her in her sleep? But Kanta was a light sleeper and had a native shrewdness that Olga lacked entirely.

Eleni’s mind raced like a mouse in a trap. While Megali and Nitsa wept over the two girls as if they were already dead, Eleni tried not to lose control. She thought about what would become of Olga if she was taken up into the mountains, to sleep beside the guerrillas and fight with a gun. She finally came to an agonizing decision. She would rather have her daughter mutilated and alive than dead or raped, she concluded. Once she had made up her mind, Eleni called the family together—including Nikola and Fotini, who listened to what she said, not yet understanding.