Eleni (39 page)

She wrapped the remains of a vegetable pie in a cloth bag and added pieces of cheese and some dried figs. Then she took a diamond-shaped, beaded pillow, about the size of a postage stamp and containing a paper image of St. Nicholas, and pinned it inside the girl’s dress on her shift.

As Kanta sat holding an untouched cup of mountain tea, a shriek splintered the icy morning air, coming from a house high above them. The guerrillas had started collecting girls at the top of the Perivoli. Eleni ran outside to see them driving several young women down the path with blows from their rifle butts while the girls’ mothers ran behind, lamenting as if for the dead. She rushed back into the house, where Kanta sat pale and quiet, her parcel in her lap.

“From the day you were born, I expected to see you leave this house to marry, not to learn war,” Eleni mourned.

The screams came closer. The guerrillas were next door, to seize Rano. They dragged her out, trailed by her sister Tassina Bartzokis, now eight months pregnant. The guerrillas turned their guns on Tassina and ordered her back inside, then they burst into the Gatzoyiannis yard, two men taking up positions on either side of the gate, two more pushing into the house.

Olga lay on a pallet with her bandaged foot propped on a stool, and Nikola and Fotini backed into corners. The rest of the family reached for Kanta, but the girl stood up and said calmly to the guerrilla in the lead, “I’m ready to go. You don’t have to hit me.”

Although her lower lip was trembling, Kanta shook loose the hands of her family and picked up her parcel. With guerrillas flanking her, each a head taller than herself, she walked out, her braids uncovered. She had left her kerchief behind.

The rest of the family followed, but at the gate, one of the two guards barred the way with the barrel of his rifle. Kanta looked back over her shoulder. “Stop crying,
Mana
,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

Eleni tried to push aside the gun barrel blocking her way while Nikola
slipped underneath and turned to look up at the two guards. He noticed that although the one on the left, a teen-ager, stood stiffly erect, his rifle in parade position and his face an expressionless mask, he was crying.

In wailing knots, prodded by the guerrillas’ guns, nearly forty unmarried women were herded toward the village square. They were pushed into a former coffeehouse and general store which the army had taken over, and sat there throughout the morning while other girls, strangers from distant villages, were crowded into the room beside them.

Still holding her parcel, Kanta sat next to her sister’s best friend, Rano Athanassiou, a well-built woman of twenty-five with dark hair, and a clever face. Because her mother had died when she was a baby and her father was an invalid, life had made Rano strong and Kanta instinctively gravitated to her for protection.

By midday the large rooms were crowded with nearly eighty newly conscripted women sitting on the floor, guarded by a handful of guerrillas. A man with sandy hair, a small mustache and ironic brown eyes walked behind a wooden table and shouted for silence. The women would soon come to know him as Alekos, one of their three instructors.

“Quiet!” he ordered. “Stop moaning and listen to me! From today you are soldiers of the Democratic Army. You will have the honor of participating in the struggle that will bring liberty to Greece!”

He spoke for several minutes about the cause and the party, traitors and monarcho-fascists and duty, but it meant nothing to Kanta. When he finished, she was startled to see Rano’s hand shoot up. The lieutenant nodded and she stood, while Kanta slid a careful inch away.

“May I say a few words on behalf of all of us, Comrade?” Rano asked, as Kanta marveled at her audacity.

“Speak,” he replied with a tight smile.

“We want to assist in the struggle for our country,” Rano said. “Let us be useful to you in a hundred ways. We’ll sew and cook and wash your clothes and mend them. We’ll be nurses and tend the wounded. But please, don’t give us guns! What do women know of guns?”

The lieutenant’s face flushed and he raised a clenched fist. “We don’t intend to see the women of Greece behind us, mending socks!” he bellowed. “We want you fighting by our side!”

He pounded on the table and then jerked his hand back with an oath, staring at the blood trickling down onto his khaki sleeve. He had gashed himself on a nail protruding from the rough wooden table. The room fell silent and, against her side, Kanta could feel Rano begin to shake.

The silence thickened, then the sandy-haired guerrilla pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the wound. He made an abrupt gesture and the guards began herding the women out of the building and across the square to another former coffeehouse where they would have their barracks.

That night, while guerrillas stood guard in each room, the eighty young
women slept on the floor, several bodies huddled under each sleeping blanket. Kanta wore both her sweaters over her wool dress against the bitter December chill and lay close to Rano, one of the few who didn’t cry herself to sleep.

The blat of a bugle startled them awake the next morning before dawn and they were led in single file down the mountainside for two hours of calesthenics. Then they were given a breakfast of mountain tea in tin cups and corn-meal mush ladled out onto tin mess plates. When the short meal was over, the girls began gathering the dishes to wash them, but a sergeant, whom they would soon call Frixos (“the Mad One”), made them stop. “You will clean your mess tins by taking off a stocking and using it to wipe them,” he announced. “We do not wash dishes in the Democratic Army.”

He held up his hand at the chorus of protests. “In battle you may have to eat off the ground—food with dirt in it, even blood,” he said. “It’s your own tin, your spoon, your stocking, your mouth. Get used to it!”

Kanta looked with loathing at the congealing remains of the mush in her plate. As she slowly removed one of her knitted stockings, she gagged. Her nausea increased five hours later when the noon meal was served—a huge pot of soup with lumps of ambiguous meat floating in a sea of shiny grease. Kanta hid in a corner chewing on the scraps her mother had given her.

The first days of military training blurred together in the pain of aching muscles, fits of dry retching from hunger, and fatigue that left Kanta numb and shaking. The recruits were allowed only six hours’ sleep, from midnight until reveille, and then were hurled into the morning exercises. After breakfast they were set to cleaning and reassembling their empty rifles and machine guns until they could do it blindfolded. Kanta struggled with the malevolent pieces of metal and never finished in time.

They were taught to storm a height while guerrillas fired a hail of bullets over their heads to make them crouch low. And every morning there was target practice. The first time, the explosion of the rifle and the brutal kick of the recoil made Kanta drop the gun and burst into tears. “Come on,
kouchiko!”
jeered Frixos, using the slang nickname the guerrillas had given her because she was the littlest. “How can you hope to be an
andartina
if you’re scared of your own gun?”

They learned to assemble and fire mortars and throw hand grenades, run obstacle courses and dig foxholes. To Kanta’s surprise, Milia Drouboyiannis, the quiet, chubby, eighteen-year-old daughter of the tinker Nassios Drouboyiannis, became the star. She had always been a shy, sullen girl, not very clever in school, who held her round head cocked to one side on her short neck, suggesting someone with a hearing problem. Now, suddenly, she turned into a fierce little guerrilla, bellowing as she rushed the hill with her bayonet, eager to disembowel an enemy, winning all the target-practice competitions and loping three grenades dead onto a target in succession. Milia was the first to take their instructor’s advice and chop off her long braids with scissors, while the other girls shuddered.

The women were never allowed to sit down between six in the morning and midnight except for the half-hour allowed for mealtime and the two indoctrination periods, morning and afternoon, when they were lectured to about the aims and philosophy of the DAG and the Communist Party. The lessons were given by Alekos and a pompous guerrilla called “the Captain,” a lawyer in civilian life, both of whom had a weakness for metaphors. Before the grass could grow, the instructors intoned, it was necessary to cut down the nettles, which Kanta soon learned meant exterminating the Greek National Army, the bloodsucking capitalists, the degenerate Glücksburg royal family and anyone else who opposed the aims of the revolutionary fighters.

During Kanta’s first days of training, Eleni moved around the village trying to learn what was happening to her daughter She was hoping that the girl would be sent home as soon as the guerrillas saw how much smaller she was than the others, but she was waiting in vain. The following morning, when she heard from the direction of the village square the faint “one-two, one-two” of the drill instructors, she hurried down toward the training field, but armed guards stopped her. “No one is to have any contact with the recruits,” she was informed. During the succeeding days, every time she heard a distant burst of gunfire or the explosion of a grenade, Eleni saw a vivid image of Kanta blown apart in a training accident.

Several days after Kanta was taken, her family was surprised by the sudden departure of the teacher Elias Gagas and his family, and by the news that the Gatzoyiannis house had been chosen as Lia’s guerrilla headquarters. It was to be the office and billet of Lieutenant Colonel Chronis Petritis, who ranked just below the leaders of the whole Epiros Command, stationed in Babouri.

Nikola and Fotini waited at the gate the next morning as Petritis, his aide and his orderly arrived, accompanied by half a dozen guerrillas carrying equipment, including the switchboard for their telephone.

Petritis was a short, stocky, sleek little man with curly dark hair and the smug expression of a well-fed spaniel, but he seemed magnificent to me as I followed him like a shadow into the good chamber, where the brass bed gleamed and the fire blazed. Petritis’ first action upon entering filled me with admiration. He took a piece of cardboard and formed it into a cone which he fastened around the guttering kerosene lamp on the bare wooden table. Suddenly the lamplight was twice as bright, concentrated on the spot where he put down some files. I had never seen a lampshade before and couldn’t wait to brag to my friends about the ingenuity of the officer who had come to live with us. In Communist school they taught us that DAG fighters were superior in
every way to the enemy, and I felt proud and protected having Petritis in the house. It seemed to me that an army with officers as clever as this couldn’t fail to win the war, but I would soon be shorn of both my admiration for Petritis and my faith in his army.

Eleni hardly noticed the lampshade as she hurried to bring the colonel firewood, blankets, walnuts in honey and some of her precious hoard of coffee. The moment Petritis walked in the door, a spark of hope ignited in Eleni’s breast. This man had the power to release Kanta from the army and she was determined to win him over.

Petritis’ arrival certainly seemed a stroke of luck. Eleni never suspected that he was the ELAS commander who had orchestrated the beatings of EDES sympathizers during the occupation, when her father Kitso was arrested, Vasili Stratis battered nearly to death, and a young man from Tsamanta murdered, his brain punctured by a nail at the end of a club. Petritis didn’t look like a killer. His well-fed appearance and two shining gold teeth attested that he was an urbane, educated man, and the family was not surprised to learn from village gossip that he had once been a schoolteacher.

His aide, Antonis, spoke with an Anatolian accent, and was also a man of education. There was a sadness in his eyes when he looked at Nikola. Bit by bit, Eleni learned that Antonis was a schoolteacher from Constantinople who had returned to visit his parents in nearby Vishini and been conscripted into the DAG against his will. There were a wife and son exactly Nikola’s age back in Constantinople whom he hadn’t seen for almost a year. Eleni soon observed Antonis’ protective attitude toward Nikola, scolding him when he climbed too high in the walnut tree or went out in the rain without shoes, and she knew that he was missing his own boy. She felt he was the most sensitive of the guerrillas and hoped to enlist him in her efforts to win Petritis’ help.

As part of her campaign to win Petritis’ help, Eleni showered the officer with small attentions. At the first opportunity she showed him the final letter from her husband, just as she had shown it to Spiro Skevis. Petritis read it and handed it back to her with an approving nod.

One day when Petritis came upon Eleni weeping over the bread trough, she gathered the courage to tell him about Kanta being taken as an
andartina
. “She’s loyal to the cause, but she’s so young—just fifteen—and so thin and sickly!” Eleni cried.

“Don’t worry, she’ll do fine,” Petritis said, and Eleni imagined a note of sympathy in his voice.

Kanta was not doing fine; she was starving because she couldn’t force herself to eat out of the common pot. Rano knew how she was suffering and
sometimes slipped her bits of food she managed to charm out of one of the guerrillas—an onion, a cucumber, an egg.

During one indoctrination period Kanta collapsed gratefully to the ground and rubbed her throbbing leg muscles.

“After the revolution, women will work side by side with men,” the captain was saying. “Women can learn to fly airplanes, drive a car, even be lawyers. They’ll get paid for the work they do, like a man. Women will have their own money!”

That novel idea appealed to Kanta, and, though in pain, she began to imagine what she would buy. She shut her eyes and drifted into a fantasy of short, silky American gowns, of tables groaning with rich
pitas
, stews of roast hare with onions like pearls and thick gravy that coated the spoon. How long had it been since she had tasted meat?

Her fantasy was interrupted by the turn in the lecture. It made her squirm.