Eleni (45 page)

As the mountains’ silhouettes began to take shape against the deep-purple sky north of Lia, the darkness was suddenly alight with swooping green flares, arching across the heavens, washing the startled faces of the guerrillas in the trenches and the sleepless villagers in their windows with a deathlike pallor. It was the signal to the nationalist reinforcements that Skitari had been taken. Now the link-up with the approaching 628th battalion had to be quickly made, and the back of the guerrilla forces would be broken. The battle was all but over.

The villagers stared at the green flares in confusion, but the guerrillas were galvanized into action. They realized that the nationalist forces had crossed their lines and come upon them from the north while they were concentrating on the south. A desperate race began; the guerrillas from all over the Mourgana dashed for Skitari, trying to surround and isolate the commandos on the height before reinforcements could reach them. Even the security guards protecting the three commanders were thrown into the race, sprinting over the top of the Prophet Elias toward Skitari.

When Eleni saw the green flares and the panic of the guerrillas she understood that the moment for escape had come. She shook the children awake and told them to get ready to move down to Megali’s house in the lower village. She warned them to take nothing, only enough food for a day, so as not to arouse the guerrillas’ suspicions. But when their mother wasn’t looking, Olga tucked her favorite red kerchief in the bosom of her dress and Kanta put on two lace shifts under her clothes.

Just as they were ready to leave, there was a knock at the door. A guerrilla was standing there with a heavy bag of flour on his back. “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

“We were moving down to my mother’s house in the lower village, where we’ll be safer from the mortars,” Eleni replied.

He made a sound of exasperation. “We’re fighting for our lives here! The men need food as much as ammunition and every house in the Perivoli has to provide bread today. Now get to work!”

As soon as he was gone, Eleni sent the rest of the family on ahead, with instructions to wait for her at the Haidis house. When she was finished baking, she would join them. They could escape that night after dark. With Megali and Nitsa in the lead, the children started down the path, drawing together every time a mortar from the distant ridge made its screaming arc over their heads, to explode in the cliffs above the Perivoli.

While Eleni and the other women of her neighborhood baked bread, the LOK commandos on top of Skitari fought for their lives. The Communists had arrived within an hour of the flares, surrounding the hill at dawn with several units. One unit climbed the peak directly across from Vorias’ company, and so close they could shout across the void that separated them.
Lieutenant George Vorias frantically telephoned for the reinforcements expected from the 628th battalion, but was told that it was pinned down three miles below in the foothills.

The guerrillas on the opposite peak included many
andartinas
, some from Lia. They found a ration tin on a dead commando with chocolate inside, and one of the young women guerrillas ate the candy and shouted, “Hey, ass-kissers of Frederika! You fight on chocolate rations, I see! Tonight we’ll have you all eating shit!”

As the day passed, the commandos stranded on top of Skitari suffered heavy casualties, but the guerrillas, who had far more machine guns, could not cross the narrow incline that separated the two peaks. Vorias counted eight of his eighty-five men dead and twenty-four wounded, including a soldier from Skiathos named Katsibaris, who had a gaping wound in his chest and was bellowing with pain, the sound of his cries demoralizing the trapped commandos even more than the heavy fire. “Don’t yell so loud,” Vorias ordered the soldier. “The guerrillas can hear you!” The prone figure fell silent, then gathered the last of his strength to channel his cries of pain into defiant singing. He shouted out a klephtic song. “Somewhere a mother sighs,” he trumpeted, and kept singing until he died.

The commandos radioed for air support, but when their planes tried to drop ammunition, heavy winds carried the bundles northward, into the hands of the guerrillas. As the sun passed its meridian, they rationed the supply of ammunition. The guerrillas on the opposite peak began to plan a nighttime attack on Skitari.

In the cellar of the Haidis house while they waited for their mother to join them, the Gatzoyiannis children huddled together, separated from the skittish goats and sheep by a wooden divider. They tried to ignore the sibilant passage of the mortars overhead, rising from a distant low whine into an ear-shattering scream before the sudden detonation shook the ground beneath them. Kanta was clenching her hands in her lap to hide their trembling. All the terrors of her guerrilla training had returned with the artillery barrage. She kept imagining a mortar falling short of the target and landing on the roof. But she knew her mother was in far worse danger in the Perivoli. Olga tried to amuse the younger children with tales of what they would do once they got to America. Nitsa kept interrupting with groans that the trauma of battle would drive her to a miscarriage. Megali rocked back and forth in a corner, addressing her absent husband. “Soul of the devil!” she wailed. “How could you leave me to die like this?”

By late afternoon the mortar shells were pounding the Perivoli with unrelenting fury as a cover for the nationalists’ 625th battalion, which had crossed the foothills, climbed the haunch of the Mourgana and was launching a direct attack on the village of Lia.

The government soldiers approached the village in two groups, one entering at the easternmost point, near the Church of Aghia Paraskevi (St.
Friday), the other creeping up below the burned-out shell of the Church of the Virgin on the southern boundary, just above the house of Eleni’s sister-in-law Alexo.

When the sunlight began to fade from the Haidis cellar, the wan glow of the one kerosene lamp gave a comforting intimacy to the faces grouped around it. Nikola thought it was a fine adventure. A war raged outside, where mighty deeds were being done; inside, he lay on a blanket spread over a compost heap of manure and straw which gave off a comforting warmth that made him drowsy. The heavy odor made him think of roasting chestnuts as he listened to the high-pitched singsong of his eldest sister’s voice hymning the wonders of America. His only concern, teasing at the edge of his consciousness, was the absence of his mother. As soon as she arrived, his circle of security would be complete and he could fall asleep.

A great thump on the cellar door brought them all to their feet. Olga opened it to find two excited, dirt-stained guerrillas holding guns. “We’re evacuating the lower village!” they shouted. “Everyone has to leave and move in with someone higher up. The fascists are nearly here! Get out now!”

The door slammed, leaving the family in a frenzy of indecision. If they climbed back up to their house, they’d lose their chance to escape; besides, no one wanted to hazard the mountain path in the dark under that blitz of artillery shells. Megali flatly refused to abandon her house, and Nitsa set up a keening wail. Olga suggested they make a run for their aunt Alexo’s house, at the very bottom of the village, but Kanta insisted that it would be suicide trying to cross the battle lines. Finally someone thought of a solution that seemed safer. They would go to the Botsaris house and ask for sanctuary. It lay just above them and to the east, right across the path that divided the upper village from the lower.

Since Alexandra Botsaris had brought her starving children there, fleeing the 1941 famine in Athens, the hovel had been patched up. Angeliki had moved in to be with her widowed mother after her husband fled to join the nationalist forces. Angeliki still faced life with the same irrepressible spirit that had made her a favorite with the British commandos. She, too, would be hoping to escape to her husband on the other side, the Gatzoyiannis children knew, and would surely help them get away when the right moment came.

The children gathered up their things and prepared to dash the hundred yards to the Botsaris house, but Fotini hung back and began to cry. “What about Mother?” she quavered. “She’ll come looking for us and we won’t be here!”

“As soon as we get to Angeliki’s, I’ll go up to the house and tell her where we are,” Olga reassured her.

Holding hands, they emerged into a landscape out of hell. Artillery shells whispered and shrieked over their heads in red arcs; trees that had been hit by shells smoldered, the bitter smoke of battle burned their nostrils, and the distant rumble of the mortars shook the ground like the approach of a huge train. From the east, near the Church of St. Friday, where guerrillas and
soldiers were mixed in hand-to-hand combat, machine guns crackled like a distant bonfire, punctuated by the occasional hollow pop of a grenade.

As they ran, there was the hard, slapping sound of mortar fire and the accelerating whine of a shell coming much too close. The scream grew, stopping them in their tracks. They looked around in confusion, then threw themselves on the earth. Kanta had been taught how to fall by the guerrillas. “On your belly!” she shouted as the shell began its descending whine, but she saw Glykeria with her head down between her knees like an ostrich and her rear end sticking up in the air. “Get your ass down, for Christ’s sake!” Kanta screamed.

The explosion stunned them, as shrapnel and dirt clattered over their head. Then there was silence. They tensed for another blast, waited, then lifted their heads and looked around. Pell-mell they sprinted toward the pale light that glowed from the cellar window of the Botsaris house, hurling themselves in a crowd against the door.

Angeliki, swollen with pregnancy, was with her terrified mother and her screaming two-year-old daughter in the cellar. She pulled them inside, delighted to have their company during the hours ahead. She had a feeling that her husband was with the attackers, Angeliki said, and would come for her.

“We’re going too!” Olga cried. “But first we’ve got to find
Mana
. The guerrillas have her baking bread up in the Perivoli, but we’ve got to get ready to leave. They’ll be here soon.”

The twilight was almost gone, and in the rank, steamy cellar, during lulls in the gunfire, they could hear the two armies taunting one another through their bull horns. “Fascists! Cuckolds!” screamed the guerrillas, two words which rhyme in Greek. The nationalist soldiers’ reply sounded just as close: “We’ll take your heads back to Yannina for souvenirs.”

Nikola shivered, knowing that the soldiers often collected enemy heads as war trophies.

“They’re nearly in the ravine!” Olga cried. “I’ve got to get
Mana!”

“You can’t go out in that!” Megali shrieked. “You won’t get ten feet from the door alive!”

“I’ll just go as far as the Makos house and shout for her from there,” Olga said.

She slipped out of the door into the peak of the battle. The mortars and machine guns were concentrated on the Perivoli, and the racket of small-arms fire filled the village center. Bullets hissed by her head as she ran, hands pressed over her ears, praying to the saints for an invisible shield. She reached the edge of the Makos field, built on a projection of land over the ravine, where she could see her own house looming a hundred yards farther up, occasionally illuminated by the Stygian glow of a flare. There was no light inside. Cupping her hands over her mouth, Olga waited for a lull, then screamed, “Ooohhh,
Mana
! Ooohhh,
Mana
!” There was no answer.

When the artillery shells began to rake the Perivoli, exploding all around her, Eleni had bolted from her door and run the fifty feet to the house just
above, where she knew that Marina Kolliou was also baking. The two women clutched each other, and leaving the bread to its fate, crowded into the storage hole under the trap door in the kitchen to wait out the bombardment. From their hiding place there was no way Eleni could hear her daughter calling.

Olga screamed for her mother until her throat was raw and tears streamed down her face. Giving up, she crouched under the swarm of bullets and scurried back down to the Botsaris house, where she collapsed in sobs, gasping that their mother was probably dead. Her announcement set off a general outburst of hysterics. Nikola retreated into the farthest corner, huddling with his hands pressed over his ears, trying to block out what his sisters were saying about his mother being shot.

By the time it was completely dark, the guerrillas and the nationalist soldiers in the eastern section of the village were fighting hand to hand, house to house, many
andartes
firing from the protection of the pillboxes. The guerrillas on the heights of the Perivoli were answering the nationalist artillery fire with such ferocity that the soldiers couldn’t advance beyond the ravine that divided the eastern half of the village from the west.

Eleni stayed in the storage hole beneath Marina-Kolliou’s kitchen, waiting for a pause in the shooting, until it was an hour past sunset and she knew she couldn’t wait any longer to join her children in the Haidis house if they were to escape. She ignored the warnings of her friend and wrapped her black kerchief around her face to make herself nearly invisible in the dark. She crept down to her house, jumped from her back garden down the terraced fields, circling west as she descended, away from the worst of the shooting, and then back east. She arrived at the Haidis house, only to find it locked and empty. In a panic she walked around it, pounding on the cellar windows, but the blows resounded in the tomblike darkness.

Her children had been swallowed up in this Armageddon! Eleni ran out the gate and over to the home of her friend Vasiliki Petsis, just to the east, but it was empty too. Then, on the other side of the path that divided the village, she glimpsed a faint light in the cellar window of the tinker Yiorgios Mallios. She scrambled up to his cellar door and began pounding and shouting. When it opened, she saw that the tiny space was crowded with people who stared fearfully out of the darkness, lighted by one candle. Vasiliki Petsis was there, but as Eleni pushed into the crowd, she found no sign of her children’s faces.