Eleni (44 page)

Coolly, with a hint of a bow, the blond captain handed Stravos his own pistol. Nikola made note of the gesture; the man’s ironic self-control made Stravos’ blustering seem ridiculous.

Muttering to himself, Stravos took careful aim and fired. And missed. His second bullet was inches wide of the mark. Then he went out of control. He stormed over to the side, and taking the pistol by the barrel, smashed it against the stone wall with such force that it broke in two. The other captain only watched with a thin smile.

Suddenly Nikola realized the solution to his problem. If he couldn’t fight, he would become an expert marksman! Once he could hit a target better than Niko Mitros, the other boys would want him as a guerrilla.

Nikola spent hours every day by himself in the garden with his slingshot, shooting rocks at clods of dirt set atop the wall. The snow was gone, and carving slingshots from the resilient wood of the willow tree was as much a rite of spring for the boys as the Lenten fast. Nikola practiced with different-sized stones and measured until he knew exactly how far above the target he should aim to compensate for the fall of the rock in its descending curve. Finally he could hit the target four times out of five.

He was ready when Niko Mitros arrived one day with his mother. His slingshot in his belt, the boy ambled out to the yard, where Nikola was absorbed in shooting clumps of earth off the garden wall, one by one. Niko Mitros watched for a while, then challenged him to a contest. This was the confrontation Nikola had imagined so often. He allowed the challenger to pick the target. The older boy pointed to the mulberry tree at the southern edge of the yard, which had several crows roosting in it. “Think you can hit one of those?”

“Probably,” said Nikola, imitating the casual manner of the blond guerrilla captain. Both boys aimed and fired at the same time, but the blackbirds rose in a complaining cloud, untouched.

“Shit!” said Niko Mitros. “The sun was in my eyes. Now what can we shoot at?”

Nikola looked around. He didn’t want the other boy to become bored with the game before he had proved himself. He spied the small dun-colored thrush sitting on the wall near the gate.

“See that bird over there?” he said, tough and cool at the same time. “Watch this!”

The bird wouldn’t move, he knew. He selected a tiny pebble off the ground so that he wouldn’t really hurt it. As he took careful aim, the bird watched him with one eye. The strap of the slingshot snapped and the missile sped with a whistling sound. Nikola was honestly surprised to see the bird topple off the wall. He ran over and picked it up. The moment he held it, incredibly light, like a handful of feathers, he knew it was dead, the tiny pulse still. Furious, he hurled the corpse away. Niko Mitros expressed his admiration with a whistle like the sound of a sky rocket. “Great shot!” he exclaimed. Nikola waited for the sweet satisfaction he had imagined, but he only felt numb. Then he knew he was going to cry. He ran, rubbing his sleeve across his eyes, and as he disappeared behind the house, he heard a snort of laughter from the other boy.

Nikola didn’t stop until he was covered by the rushes that grew beside the washing pond. He hid his face in his arms; after a while he turned over on his back to watch the weak rays of the winter sun filter through the rushes. Images of the bird dead and Lakis crying and himself cowering under the rain of snowballs were all mixed up in his mind. He tried to sort them out. To be tough like Niko Mitros and the guerrillas he impersonated meant taking pleasure in the sufferings of someone weaker, but Nikola could not make himself stop feeling the pain of the victim. One thing was clear—his chances of being chosen for the guerrilla team were ruined. He wasn’t sure he was sorry.

While the signs of impending war fascinated the children and colored their games, the adults reacted with increasing fear. To Eleni it seemed that the government planes flew closer every day and that the whine and rumble of the artillery became louder every night, startling her out of her sleep. She would sit and study the faces of her sleeping children by the embers and imagine the fighting that was taking place on the distant mountains. All the villagers knew that it was just a matter of time until the pot boiled over and they were embroiled in the fighting; otherwise, why were the guerrillas so frantically fortifying the whole mountain range?

Eleni’s waking fears crept into her sleep, and one night she had a dream that frightened her so, she told the family about it the next morning. As she slept, it seemed that she was awakened by the
brr
of the hand-turned bell on the gate. She saw herself get up in the darkness and go outside to undo the bolt. Standing there in the path, frosted with silver moonlight, was the round, smiling figure of her long-dead mother-in-law, Fotini.

The old woman reached out and touched Eleni’s cheek with icicle fingers. “Hello, my little bride,” she said fondly in a rustling voice like dry leaves. “I’ve missed you! I was passing by up the path and knocked to tell you to prepare your things, because I’ll be coming for you soon. But now, go back and finish sleeping. There’s still time; I have to go and get Tsavena first.”

Eleni brooded over the dream all day. Tsavena, the old crone who had seen Nikola emerging from his homemade swimming pool, was the mother of their next-door neighbor Marina Kolliou. “It means I’m going to die, and Tsavena before me,” Eleni said to Nitsa. “Perhaps a bomb while I’m working on fortifications or a bullet while I’m carrying wounded. If I die, what will become of the children?”

“What do you know about dreams?” scoffed Nitsa. “I should hope Tsavena’s going to die before you; she’s ninety years old! Her oil is nearly burned up. You were probably just sleeping on your left side again. How many times have I warned you it interferes with digestion? Your mother-in-law was probably just a fried onion that went down the wrong way.”

•  •  •

The code name that the government forces selected for their carefully planned attack on the “impregnable” Mourgana was “Pergamos,” an ancient Greek city in Asia Minor where the Greeks defeated the Turks in 1919 against crushing odds. Operation Pergamos was scheduled to begin on February 25, 1948.

Seven battalions of the government’s Eighth Division—nearly 3,500 men—were assigned to Operation Pergamos to attack the four battalions—about 1,400 Communist guerrillas—entrenched in the Mourgana villages and the foothills below, one of them commanded by Major Spiro Skevis.

The government troops planned to attack the Mourgana in a pincer movement, three battalions and a squadron of mountain commandos striking from the north, and three battalions and a double company of irregulars coming up from the south and moving toward the large hills below Lia. The northern prong of the pincer would start moving down first, clearing out the guerrilla concentrations on the opposite side of the Mourgana peaks from Lia, while the southern prong would launch attacks to “soften” the ground in the foothills below. The driving wedge of the attack from the north was to be an expert group of specially trained commandos called LOK, an acronym for the Greek words meaning “Squadron of Mountain Commandos”—nearly 300 men trained in scaling mountain heights. Their assignment was to sneak through the enemy lines and secure a small but critical hill called Skitari within guerrilla territory, only two miles northeast of Lia but hidden from sight of the village by the peaks of the Prophet Elias and Kastro.

As soon as the commandos signaled their success in reaching the hill, the seventh battalion, moving in from the southeast, would rush to link up with them, and if the surprise worked, the guerrillas would be effectively sliced into two groups, forced to flee northwest into Albania or be crushed by the closing prongs of the pincer, which were to come together in the village of Lia.

On February 25 the three battalions of government soldiers in the north began to move down from the Pogoni area, pushing through the hills, sweeping the guerrillas they encountered either into Albania or toward Lia. The villagers could see nothing of this: the mountain peaks above them blocked their view, but they knew that an attack was under way because the government troops poised to the south, on the opposite edge of the valley that stretched below them, began the “softening up” of the area they planned to take, bombarding the three high ridges forming the southern rim of the bowl of mountains and the foothills below. For three days the villagers watched as a constant rain of bombs, mortar fire and artillery in the distance pushed the guerrillas slowly back toward them.

On February 28 the massive force of government troops from the south began to move down into the foothills, while the guerrillas, vastly outnumbered, could only back up, trying to nip and snap at the enemy with ambushes and night attacks. “Heavy and mechanical is the sound of the
hardheaded moving enemy forces. They are the lifeless mass crawling along,” wrote Greek novelist Demitrios Hatzis, who was one of the Communist fighters in the Mourgana. For three days the guerrillas desperately fought to hold back the irresistible advance of the government fighting machine. But Operation Pergamos was proceeding exactly according to plan; the pincers slowly closed from both the north and the south. The commanders of the Communist forces, who had been stationed in Babouri, decided to move their headquarters to the mountain heights above Lia, where they would be better protected by large numbers of their men to the east and west, and the natural indentation of the mountain range into which Lia was nestled. In case the worst happened, they could retreat all the way up to the Albanian border.

Ever since February 25 when the heavy bombardment broke out in the foothills below, Eleni had kept the children in the house, watching from the windows as government planes strafed the guerrilla positions to the south, and mortar and artillery fire made a fireworks display in the night sky over the lowlands. But on the morning of March 1 a procession appeared, moving up the path outside the Gatzoyiannis gate, that brought the whole family out of the house to stare. The three leaders of the entire Epiros Command, flanked by their staff and equipment, were riding by on horseback, heading for the relative safety of the mountain cliffs above the Perivoli.

To my eight-year-old eyes they were the grandest men I had ever seen—the ultimate commanders of the whole guerrilla army; at least the half of it occupying Epiros. The horses they rode seemed to tower higher than elephants. The grim parade moved silently between the rows of our neighbors, who searched the faces of the three officers for a clue to the outcome of the battle. The one who resembled a bulldog, a square fortress of a man with curly hair and great bushes of eyebrows, was Yiorgos Kalianesis, the chief of staff. The sleek, fox-faced one with the small charcoal mustache, thick matted black hair and a dashing military coat thrown over his shoulders like a mantle was Kostas Koliyiannis, the political commissar. Riding next to him was the military commander, Vasilis Chimaros. I don’t remember him very well, but I remember Kalianesis’ gleaming pistol in his belt holster and the leather of his accouterments shining in the sun. Behind and in front of the three commanders came their retinue: mules loaded with arms and equipment, the headquarters staff, radios, provisions, and bodyguards surrounding their war lords. As I watched the procession pass, it seemed that there could be no greater embodiment of success than these three all-powerful men.

God is an ironist; the next time I saw Yiorgos Kalianesis, thirty-three years later, the magnificent martial presence had been reduced to a
harassed night clerk behind the desk of a third-rate hotel in Yannina. The balding, heavy-jowled former major general was almost pitifully eager to describe his wartime exploits to the American reporter who seemed so interested, but his tales of glory were constantly interrupted by shabby tourists with backpacks demanding the keys to their rooms.

The appearance of the three commanders outside the Gatzoyiannis gate set off a flurry of activity inside. Lieutenant Colonel Petritis hurried to join his superiors in the mountain heights, and as soon as he, his aide and orderly were packed, they left, never to return to the house.

Eleni stood on the veranda watching the column of battle-weary guerrillas retreating up the path toward the heights, some carrying wounded comrades, and imagined that she could read defeat in their faces. Just a glance to the south made it clear that the government troops had already taken the distant height of the Great Ridge as well as its two neighbors: Plokista and Taverra. The line of battle had moved into the foothills, ever closer to the village. She knew that men from Lia would be approaching with the government troops, perhaps among them some of those who had fled to Filiates: her father and her brothers-in-law Foto Gatzoyiannis and Andreas Kyrkas.

The moment was approaching that would decide her family’s fate, for if the soldiers reached this high, Eleni knew she could escape with the children behind their lines, down into the foothills, across the Great Ridge and on to Filiates, where relatives and help would be waiting. From Filiates she had only to telegraph Christos, who would send them the money to come to America. But first they had to cross the battle line.

As she watched the retreat of the guerrillas past her door, Eleni was working out a plan. As soon as it became clear that the government soldiers might reach the edge of Lia, she would take her family down to her mother’s empty house in the lower village to be that much closer to the soldiers and farther away from the guerrilla headquarters. If anyone questioned them, they had a logical excuse for the move; the Haidis house, in a small hollow in the hillside, was much less exposed to the nationalist guns, which would be aiming at the guerrilla headquarters in the Perivoli and above.

The whole family lay awake that night, listening to the sounds of battle approaching from the south, not suspecting that the most critical phase of the battle was taking place silently just to the north of them, on the other side of their own mountain. There, as soon as darkness fell, the three hundred expert commandos of the LOK brigade crept through the guerrilla lines led by an elderly shepherd who knew every foothold on the almost sheer face of the cliff called Skitari. The commandos had been equipped by the Americans with fur-lined jackets, heavy sweaters and rubber-soled boots that clung to the rocks and made no sound. They were divided into four companies, one led by a lieutenant named George Vorias. Just before
dawn on March 3, his company achieved the summit of Skirtari, directly across from the tallest peak of the Mourgana range.