Eleni (38 page)

If Olga couldn’t walk, the guerrillas couldn’t take her, Eleni said. Olga nodded, frightened but proud of being the center of all eyes. They would pour boiling water over her foot, Eleni continued grimly, and tell the guerrillas it was an accident.

As they put a kettle on the fire, Olga tried to prepare herself. The only painful thing that had ever happened to her was when she fell out of the walnut tree and broke two fingers, but although she tried to remember how it felt, she couldn’t.

When the water was boiling, Eleni handed Olga a cloth and told her to put it into her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream and rouse the neighborhood. They propped her naked right foot on a stool and put a large pot underneath to catch the water. Olga had always taken pride in her small hands and feet, delicate as a child’s. Eleni picked up the pot and shut her eyes. Everyone was watching.

The tense faces of my mother, sisters and grandmother seemed unfamiliar in the red glow of the fire. Unconsciously I had stuffed my fist into my mouth, in imitation of Olga with the cloth in hers. My mother took a deep breath and poured the water over the extended foot, while my aunt held the leg so that Olga couldn’t draw back. For an instant there was silence and then, despite the cloth, Olga began to make high-pitched squeals that reminded me of the sound of a kid being slaughtered.

We all stood staring at the foot while Olga silently wiped her tears with the cloth. The skin on top immediately turned red and puffed up with blisters. After a while my mother and aunt exchanged looks as they realized the plan had failed. Olga’s feet had become so hard from walking barefoot that it didn’t look bad enough. The guerrillas would take her anyway.

My mother sat down heavily, looking sick. I saw her eyes stray to the fireplace where a poker was leaning against the wall. She went over, picked it up and held it in the flames. The others understood what she was doing before I did, and gasped. Olga began crying softly. When the end of the poker was glowing, I watched my mother walking toward
Olga and I began to back away. Olga screwed her face up like a child waiting to be hit, her eyes squeezed shut. My mother leaned over the foot. There was a pulse beating just below the ankle. Her face seemed to age, and she turned away, dropping the poker. “I can’t do it,” she whispered. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it out explosively.

My grandmother spoke into the silence. “I can,” she said, “if it will save my granddaughter.” We all turned in amazement to look at the frail, birdlike old woman who had always seemed so helpless. She picked up the poker and reheated it in the fire. Then I saw my grandmother thrust it into the can of hydrochloric acid which was used for cleaning the inside of scorched pots. The poker was shaking violently as she turned toward Olga, who, forgetting about the cloth, began to slide off the chair onto the floor. My aunt pinned her to the floor with both hands on her shoulders. My mother grabbed the ankle of the blistered foot and turned her face away. I felt I was in a bad dream; they couldn’t be doing this! I closed my eyes to make the scene go away.

The sizzle of the poker hitting flesh filled the room. Then Olga shrieked and was cut off by my aunt clasping the cloth over her mouth. I heard an answering groan from my mother. I looked and saw my grandmother lifting the poker off Olga’s foot with a gobbet of skin clinging to it, leaving visible raw meat below, white shiny tendons in the pale red flesh. There was a pungent odor in the room, which haunts me still. I bolted out the door and into the yard.

At the sight of her foot Olga screamed again, but Eleni gently turned the girl’s face away and put a damp cloth to her cheeks, her own face wet with tears. Fotini could not stop looking at the foot. Megali hurried away and returned with a cabbage. She wrapped cabbage leaves around the raw wound to make it swell, and the prickly leaves were like alcohol on the flesh. Olga writhed and moaned while Eleni and Nitsa tried to hold her still. When she had finished her work, Megali wrapped the foot around with a white cloth.

For most of the night Olga lay sobbing in her mother’s lap. Kanta couldn’t sleep either. She couldn’t get the sound of the poker and the smell of burning flesh out of her mind, and when she did doze off before dawn, she awoke with nightmares of huge, bearded soldiers chasing her. She knew that her mother had chosen Olga for salvation and decided on herself to go because she was younger and less likely to be raped. She felt terribly lonely.

The next morning Olga screamed again when they removed the bandages and the cabbage leaves. It was so swollen, it didn’t even look like a foot. The ankle was gone. The wound was leaking pus, and angry red lines ran up the leg. Olga couldn’t even sit up, much less stand. They gently re-wrapped the foot and left her lying on her pallet.

Later in the day Eleni walked over to Tassina’s house, which was being
used by the guerrillas as a dispensary. She asked the guerrilla-doctor if he would be kind enough to look at her daughter’s foot. It was just a kitchen accident, she explained, a coal rolled out of the fireplace and burned the top of the foot. “We put mouse oil on it right away,” said Eleni, referring to the standard village burn remedy of oil in which a dead mouse has been suspended, “but there seems to be something wrong—the foot is all swelled up.”

The doctor agreed to have a look, and when he unwrapped the bandages, the shock showed on his face. “This is infected, she could lose the foot!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give you some ointment—none of that village nonsense!—and you must keep the wound clean and change the bandages every day. She isn’t to walk on it for several weeks at least. I’ll be back in a few days to see her.”

They all congratulated each other. Eleni had played her part so well that the doctor seemed to suspect nothing. But the next day two
andartes
came by with a list in their hands, containing the names of every unmarried girl in Lia over fifteen. They had heard from the doctor about Olga’s “accident” and demanded that the bandages be removed. When Eleni saw them wince at the sight, she knew that she had saved her daughter. But the soldiers seemed angry, and before they left, they commanded, “Have your second daughter, Alexandra, ready to join the People’s Democratic Army tomorrow morning.”

By the end of December 1947 the Greek Communist Party was ready to drive the linchpin of its new strategy and prove to the world that it had the strength to seize power. Now that key mountain strongholds were secure, the DAG would announce the formation of a provisional government and quickly capture a major population center to serve as its capital.

The Communist guerrillas were in complete control of the Mourgana massif, stretching for twenty miles along the border between Greece and Albania, as well as the Grammos mountains on the northern end of the Pindos range, where the provinces of Epiros and Macedonia meet. From these bases they could threaten the entire northwest region of Greece including the capital of Epiros—Yannina.

On Christmas Eve the Democratic Army’s radio station, located in Albania, announced the formation of a provisional Democratic Government of Free Greece under the presidency of Markos Vafiadis. The country tensed, waiting for the other shoe to drop—the expected attack on a town to serve as the new “government’s” capital. Yannina seemed the likely target.

Within twenty-four hours, before dawn on Christmas Day, the Communist guerrillas launched their attack not on Yannina but on Konitsa, forty miles north of the provincial capital. Konitsa had the virtues of lying between their major strongholds in the Mourgana and Grammos mountains as well as being just twelve miles from the Albanian border.

Only hours after the citizens had returned from midnight mass, Markos threw his force of 10,000 guerrillas at the town of 5,000. The alarm was sounded and the defenders barricaded themselves in every house.

For the Communist guerrillas it was vital to win this battle. By
establishing their capital in Konitsa, they hoped to earn recognition for their provisional government from socialist countries, and full material support from the one ally essential to their victory—the Soviet Union. An unconvinced Russia had, until now, provided only limited aid through the Communist countries bordering Greece—Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

Markos concentrated all the manpower and heavy artillery he commanded on the Christmas Day attack. One of the first important positions captured was the bridge at Bourazani spanning the river Aoos, over which any reinforcements from Yannina would have to travel.

It seemed impossible that Konitsa could hold out against the vastly superior forces of the attackers, but the guerrillas had not counted on the desperation of the townspeople, surrounded and cut off from any escape route, who fought alongside the government troops, turning every house into a small fort. While the world watched, the battle of Konitsa stretched on from Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve.

To support the attack, Markos pulled as many guerrillas as possible away from their positions in the Mourgana. The government troops, with superior manpower, tried to prevent the shift by attacking the guerrilla positions in the Mourgana. Suddenly the occupied villages like Lia found themselves engulfed in the maelstrom of war.

I
T WAS ELEVEN DAYS
before Christmas, the night of December 14, 1947, when the guerrillas came to the Gatzoyiannis house and ordered Eleni to prepare her second daughter for the Democratic Army. Although she had managed to save Olga, she knew Kanta was lost. Eleni spent the hours until dawn mourning the loss of the daughter who was most like herself.

Olga and Glykeria had inherited the round contours and soft features of their father, but Kanta was angular and thin, with the same high cheekbones, sharply etched mouth and deep-set, intense eyes as her mother. She had passed her fifteenth birthday, only two days before the guerrillas occupied the village, but she still seemed a child, fragile and flat-chested as a boy.

Mother and daughter sat together, unable to sleep, and Eleni stroked Kanta’s hair. “If you faint and act like you’re sick and pretend to be too stupid to learn, they may get disgusted and let you go,” she advised. “Tell them you’re afraid of the guns. How can they send a baby like you to the battlefield?” She paused to choose her words, then added, “At night keep as far away from the guerrillas as you can. If you let down your guard and fall asleep at the wrong moment, you could be ruined forever.”

Eleni pushed back images of Kanta being raped or shot and consoled herself with the thought that although she was the frailest of the girls, she was also the smartest. Until she put on the kerchief, Kanta had been the best student in school. Like Eleni, she had always burned with the ambition to escape the village and discover the world beyond. The girl was also as fastidious as her mother. She complained that her sisters smelled bad, and refused to eat food cooked by Nitsa, making sarcastic remarks about her aunt’s sloppy dress, greasy hair and dirty fingernails.

Although she was as thin as shepherd’s crook, food was Kanta’s obsession, just as fine clothes was Olga’s. The only way Eleni could bribe her to spend a day in the high pastures with the flocks was to promise her a special dish for supper. Once, her patience stretched beyond its limits, Eleni half jokingly laid a curse on her two eldest daughters. “You!” she said to Olga.
“May you grow up to have trunks of clothes and never find anything you like to wear! And you, black one,” she added, turning to Kanta, “may you have a pantry full of food and never be satisfied with what you’re eating.”

Eleni often indulged Kanta’s moods because she knew the girl was more high-strung than the others, too sensitive to attend funerals, out the door at the first threat of tears or anger. Since she was a baby, Kanta had passed through phases of nightmares, sleepwalking, nervous stomach aches and fainting spells. Remembering all this, Eleni wondered how she could ever survive as an
andartina
. She could only pray that her intelligence and the stubbornness that lay at the core of that small body might save her.

When Kanta eventually fell asleep, Eleni covered her gently, then moved about the room, collecting things. She picked out two warm cardigan sweaters that she had made and a pair of heavy knitted stockings. When the eastern sky turned violet and Kanta awoke with a nightmare still in her eyes, Eleni crooned to her and dressed her as if she were a baby.