Eleni (46 page)

“The guerrillas came around evacuating everyone from the lower village,” said Vasiliki. “That’s why I’m here and the Haidis house is empty. But who knows where your family went? The guerrillas said the soldiers have already taken the Church of the Virgin. Your sister-in-law is below it, so perhaps they made a dash for her house.”

Eleni realized that she must be right; they had already moved down to the bottom of the village to wait for her on the very edge of freedom with her sister-in-law Alexos. But they were risking their lives crossing the ravine
on the very edge of the battle zone. She took a deep breath and turned to go. If the children could do it, she could too. Perhaps she’d catch up with them on the way. Once they got to Alexo’s alive, the road to freedom stretched easily in front of them.

Even in the dark Eleni knew the path through the Haidis bean field, down into the ravine and across the small wooden footbridge over the steam. She would have to climb up the other side of the crevasse, which would bring her dangerously close to the fighting, and angle off to the south, following the path that hung on the edge of the gorge until she came out at Alexos’ house.

The lower she descended into the chasm toward the sound of running water, the safer she felt, for now the long-range artillery and mortar shells were arcing high over her head, still pounding away at the Perivoli, and to her ears it seemed that the hand fighting had come no farther westward than the village schoolhouse in the square. As she climbed the other side of the ravine, Eleni could see from that direction the flames of burning buildings and the firefly glimmers of bullets. She headed south on the narrow footpath that edged the top of the ravine, picking her way carefully, for one misstep would send her tumbling down into the chasm. Occasionally she dislodged a stone or clump of earth and heard it bouncing several times before splashing into the water below. She kept her left hand out, touching the hillside that rose beside the path, ready to grasp a branch if she started to slip.

Now and then a red tracer flare illuminated the landscape and she would shrink back into the shadows of the vegetation. Just as Eleni reached the last outward curve in the footpath before her sister-in-law’s land, she drew back against the cliff, put her hand behind her to steady herself and touched someone’s arm. She choked back a scream. The illumination of the flare was gone, but she could see a dark form, reclining in a half-sitting position against the hillside, loose-limbed, head lolling on its shoulder like a floppy rag doll. Eleni knew it was a corpse; she had felt the puttylike chill of the flesh beneath the fabric. Her teeth began to chatter and she turned and ran, afraid now to steady herself against the cliff, stumbling along the narrow footpath by instinct.

The light in the window of Alexo’s house pulled her on with the promise of her children waiting for her. She could hardly shout her name as she leaned on the door. When it was opened, she saw her sister-in-law’s kind, worried face peering out, wide-eyed. “Eleni, how did you ever get here?” Alexo exclaimed. “And where are the children?”

She almost fell before Alexo caught her and carried her to a chair. Eleni looked weakly around the room. There were half a dozen neighbors there, besides Alexo’s eleven-year-old daughter, Niki. Finally she managed to say, “I thought the children had come here so that we could all leave together. If they aren’t here, then I’ve lost them!”

Alexo brought a tiny glass of
raki
and held it to her lips. “The soldiers
have been here, right in the house,” she said. “I asked if we should leave and they said to wait until morning. By then they’ll have the whole village, Eleni. Stay with us until dawn, and then the guerrillas will be gone and you can find the children.”

“You don’t know what it’s like up there,” Eleni cried. “I can’t leave them lost in the middle of all this!” Her mind flashed from one disjointed image to another: the corpse she had touched, her children lying in a gully, bleeding, calling out to her, Nikola frightened and alone.

Alexo held her tight as she shivered. Finally the fit of weakness left her and she willed herself to go back out into the darkness.

“You’ll be killed—someone will take you for a soldier!” Alexo protested as she stood up. When she saw Eleni wasn’t listening, she brought her a torch—a piece of kindling from the fireplace, smoldering at one end—and told her to wave it as a signal flare so that the soldiers would realize she wasn’t one of the enemy. Eleni took it gladly. Even a burning stick seemed like some sort of protection against the horror waiting in the night.

As she retraced her steps along the precipitous footpath, holding the torch in front of her, the sounds of battle seemed to be nearer. She tried not to imagine what the corpse would look like in the light of the torch, but she never got that far. A dark silhoutte stepped into her path and demanded, “Who are you? Where are you going?” Eleni held up her flare and saw more dark figures, ranged all the way up the hill.

“Eleni Gatzoyiannis, wife of Christos, from the neighborhood of the Perivoli,” she said, pointing across the ravine. “I’m trying to find my children.”

The figure came closer and she could see the crown insignia on his two-pointed hat. “You can’t go any farther,” he said. “The guerrilla lines are all across the upper half of the village. From here to there is a firing range.”

“But my children are over there!” Eleni exclaimed.

“We’ll have the whole village by morning,” said the soldier. “Wait till then.”

Eleni turned back, but as soon as she was out of sight of the soldier, she began to clamber straight down the steep side of the chasm, braking her descent by holding on to bushes and scrub pine, lowering herself a foot at a time down the sheer drop toward the stream that sang so far below. Somehow she held on to the torch. When she was finally at the streambed, she plunged into the icy water and began to walk upstream, wading across at a shallow point and passing by the wooden footbridge. She continued walking against the current, until she had to start climbing up the cliff beside the waterfall, pulling herself up by the underbrush. Finally she emerged at the point where a path passed just above the Haidis house, dividing the village horizontally. From there she could see the guerrillas just below her, aiming down toward the nationalist soldiers. They were nearly shoulder to shoulder, some firing rifles, others feeding belts of ammunition into machine guns. Eleni realized she could never get to the Haidis house,
now in the middle of no man’s land. She looked around helplessly and saw a glimmer of light from the cellar of the Botsaris house just above her.

Wiping tears of exhaustion from her eyes, Eleni scrambled up to the Botsaris cellar door and pounded on it. She heard footsteps, then it opened a crack. There was a scream and the door flew open. She saw Olga standing there, and her knees buckled.

Eleni sat and shuddered convulsively while Nikola crowded into the circle of her arms. Slowly her joy at finding her children turned to anger. “Do you know what you’ve put me through tonight?” Eleni cried. “If you’d been in the Haidis house, the way we planned, we could be safe now and on our way to Filiates!”

“But the guerrillas wouldn’t let us stay!” Olga protested. “They evacuated the lower village. That’s why we came here.” She explained how she had tried to call to Eleni from the Makos house. When Eleni understood, she scolded her daughter for taking such a risk.

“But now that you’ve come and we’re all together, we can leave!” Olga said.

Eleni shook her head. “It’s impossible! There’s no way all of us could make it alive through the guerrilla lines. They’re fighting shoulder to shoulder just below the house.” She stared into the shadows for a moment, thinking how close they had been to freedom, then she tightened her arms around Nikola. “Never mind,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and pray that the soldiers drive them up the mountain past us. Alexo said that by morning they’ll have taken the whole village. We can leave then.”

The government soldiers never advanced beyond the lower boundary of the Haidis property. By 2
A.M
. on March 3, the tide of battle had turned and the government troops were in retreat.

During the same night, the commandos lost the hill of Skitari. When darkness fell, Lieutenant Vorias discovered that he had only thirteen of his eighty-five men left; the rest had been killed, wounded or sent away carrying wounded comrades. When he asked for reinforcements from the LOK companies fighting lower down the hill, he learned that they had gone. After digging a trench in the snow to bury the dead, Vorias and his surviving men rolled down the steep face of the height until they reached a ravine and escaped to the southeast. Operation Pergamos had failed.

In the morning, as the villagers of Lia ventured out into the first daylight, the stink of gunpowder hung in the air and they saw the mountainside below their village littered with bodies and the refuse of battle. The soldiers had been driven all the way down to the rise of St. Marina in the foothills, where they were still being pounded by the guerrilla artillery.

The all-clear came at dawn as the guerrillas walked through the village shouting over bull horns that the fascists had been triumphantly driven back in retreat and that everyone could return to their homes. Exhausted, the Gatzoyiannis family retraced their steps to the Haidis house. The children
still hoped that the soldiers might make another advance, but Eleni suspected that their last chance at escape had slipped through their grasp.

Nitsa, Megali and the children lay down on their pallets as soon as they entered the house, but Eleni was too troubled to sleep. She went next door to share her sorrow with Vasiliki Petsis. The two women sat on the steps, talking in low voices, wondering if the battle was truly over. From the corner of her eye Eleni saw a movement near the path and put a warning hand on Vasiliki’s knee.

“Who’s in there?” Vasiliki demanded. Out of the bush popped the frightened face of a young man, his brown hair matted with bits of leaves and twigs. When he stood up, the two women saw that he was wearing the khaki uniform of the nationalist army. “Help me, ladies!” he pleaded. “Tell me which way the soldiers went. I’ve lost my company!”

Eleni and Vasiliki stared. The boy was swaying with fatigue and fear, but he didn’t seem to be wounded.

“They’ve gone,” Vasiliki whispered. “Go straight down the ravine. And be careful!”

The soldier stiffened as they heard footsteps approaching. Up the path came the figure of Spiros Christos, the village blacksmith, who was climbing from his home on the other side of the ravine toward the Perivoli. He stopped, examined the young man curiously and asked, “What have we here?”

“A lost soldier,” Vasiliki replied.

The blacksmith blinked, then recovered his composure. “Stay right where you are,” he said. “I saw some soldiers going up the hill. I’ll find them and bring them here.” He took one more look to make sure the boy was real, then hurried off.

The women glanced at each other, then Vasiliki burst out in an urgent whisper, “Run, boy! He’s gone to fetch the guerrillas! Run or you’re dead!”

The soldier took off down the ravine like a startled quail. Minutes later, when half a dozen
andartes
led by the blacksmith crashed down the path into the yard, the two women spread their hands. “We tried to keep him here,” said Vasiliki, “but he went running off.”

She was pointing toward the spring above the ravine. Soon the women could hear the
andartes
calling to one another and beating the bushes with their rifles.

At guerrilla headquarters high above the Perivoli, the two commanders and Lieutenant Colonel Petritis had their heads bent over a map. Although they had successfully driven the enemy out of the Mourgana, there was still the danger of a counterattack. More than 3,000 soldiers, twice their own manpower, were reassembling in the foothills below. It was necessary to strike a decisive blow before the enemy could marshal their forces.

The guerrilla leaders decided on an offensive maneuver against the enemy’s left flank which would be launched that night. The key element was surprise. They would send four companies, under the command of the fiery Major Spiro Skevis, to attack Povla, the village on the southern rim of the bowl of mountains which the national forces had captured and secured several days before. Povla was occupied by the government’s 611th battalion, and the slopes on the west of the village were in the hands of a detachment of seasoned irregulars under the command of a notorious Cretan with a bristling mustache named Mitsos Galanis.

Galanis had hand-picked the 250 men in his detachment, who wore distinctive green berets and shoulder patches with the special insignia of an attacking eagle. The Communists called Galanis “the Butcher,” and the tales of his brutality were legion. Decades after the war Galanis himself insisted that the atrocities attributed to him, such as cutting off the genitals of prisoners and stuffing them into their mouths, were groundless. He admitted, however, that he never took prisoners alive. His victims were often decapitated and their heads sent by the sackful with couriers to Yannina, where they were displayed in rows in the courtyard of division headquarters.

To take Povla, Spiro Skevis would have less than half of the enemy’s manpower—only 300 guerrillas against 700 soldiers—but he was eager to launch the attack and could hardly wait for nightfall. After dark he silently led his men through the bitter cold to the very edge of Povla, sending some behind the Albanian border where they circled around to seize the undefended hills south of the village.

The nationalist soldiers, having eaten and drunk well, were asleep at two-thirty when Skevis gave the command: “On them!” The devil’s own host seemed to have fallen out of the sky, guerrillas breaking down every door, fighting hand to hand with knives as well as guns. The soldiers, wrenched from sleep, were thrown into confusion and easily captured, but on the hills outside the village, Galanis and all but thirteen of his men managed to escape.

Several dozen soldiers inside Povla tried to take refuge in the village church and were caught by the company of Harisis Stravos, the convicted murderer who had broken his pistol in a rage. Like Galanis on the government side, Stravos did not believe in taking prisoners. He lined up the soldiers inside the church and stabbed each one in turn until the floor was awash with blood.