Eleni (48 page)

I
N LATE MARCH OF
1948, as the villagers of Lia began planting the early beans, onions and corn, they saw the guerrillas at the village boundaries and down in the foothills planting another sort of crop: land mines, designed to blossom instantaneously under the weight of a human body into the red flower of death.

The nearly successful attack on the Mourgana earlier in the month and the escape of three village women had taught Lia’s occupiers a lesson. They were determined to plug up the Mourgana villages like a corked wine jug so that no one could get in or out. It seemed certain that the attack of Operation Pergamos would be repeated, so all likely paths of approach throughout the foothills and up the ravines were heavily mined. The twenty-four-hour guards posted at lookout points throughout the village were strengthened to prevent any more embarrassments like the three escapes.

Eleni forbade her children to leave the yard for fear that a careless step would trigger a mine. Throughout the Mourgana the peasants became very careful where they put their feet down. But the inevitable happened in the neighboring village of Babouri. A group of local boys had been ordered to drive a herd of mules to Tsamanta for the guerrillas. Their leader, a slow-witted young man, stepped off the road to answer a call of nature and both his legs were blown off. The smaller boys managed to carry him back to the house of Eleni’s cousin Antonova Paroussis, on the western edge of Babouri, but he died there, cursing and gushing his life’s blood all over the floor while her small children watched.

The political commissar of the Mourgana, Kostas Koliyiannis, felt that land mines and more lookouts were not enough to guarantee the complete “cooperation” of the villagers of Lia. He decided to establish a security police station in the village like the one that existed in Babouri. He needed to find a house large enough to contain the police office, interrogation rooms and a secure cellar for a jail. The only house in Lia of adequate size belonged to the Amerikana.

One morning in mid-March, Eleni opened her gate to find Sotiris Drapetis standing there. The sight of the reptilian eyes in the lean, handsome face made her throat tighten, remembering the day he had torn her home apart searching for guns.

Sotiris informed Eleni that the Democratic Army required her house for its new police station. For security reasons, no civilians could be allowed to remain living in it. She would have twenty-four hours to find another dwelling for her family.

She knew there was only one place left for them to go; the two-room house of her parents, which had been empty ever since Megali was beaten up by Sotiris’ henchmen and came to live with her daughter.

Overnight the Gatzoyiannis family prepared to move out of the Perivoli into the lower village. Besides the fourteen goats, their sleeping blankets, clothes and some corn, there was not much to salvage. Sotiris ordered Eleni to leave the sewing machine and the gramophone behind; they were needed by the Democratic Army. She wrapped the photograph of Christos and the golden pitcher from Constantinople in some clothing, then silently began to take leave of the house where she had spent the twenty-two years of her marriage. She had given birth to her children and watched her mother-in-law die in these rooms. It was like leaving part of her body behind.

Eleni stood for a while before the corner iconostasis, where she crossed herself first thing every morning and last thing every night. She walked around, touching the luxuries which had made her house the finest in the village: the brass bed, the built-in shoe rack, the ingenious water supply of hanging barrels outside the kitchen, the huge gate with its brass handles and doorbell, the carved fireplace with her husband’s name on it. She looked for the last time out the window at the view of the valleys and mountains to the south. She would never see the horizon from this perspective again. It was only a fifteen-minute walk down the mountain to where she was going, but it seemed half the world away.

Each of the daughters said goodbye in her own fashion to the house where she had been born. Olga collected her dowry from its hiding place in Rano and Tassina’s house, lovingly wrapped it in a tarpaulin and carried it down to her grandmother’s. Fotini clutched the small sack of baubles that she had been given by the commissary head, Hanjaras. Nikola silently walked around outside, paying a last visit to the places which were as familiar to him as his mother’s face.

Leaving the house was the first major dislocation in my life. Invaders, battles, bombs, executions and famine had afflicted Lia in the eight years since I was born, but every day I had awakened to see the same view of the mountains below, with the mulberry tree in the foreground, and every night I had fallen asleep by the same hearth with my mother and sisters around me. I knew every inch of the Perivoli; where each
chicken hid its eggs, when every tree would flower and bear fruit and where the crows would land to peck for food and perhaps blunder into one of my crude traps. I passed the spot in the garden where I had built my unsuccessful swimming pool and visited the hay shed up above the mill of the Mitros family where I once watched a newlywed couple, seeking privacy from their relatives, engaged in mysterious acrobatics which I described to my family with such vivid mimicry and sound effects that my recitation became an instant success throughout the Perivoli.

I took a last look at the hillocks and low walls where the boys of the neighborhood had played war. There were no boys my age living near my grandparents’ house, and although I had never managed to win the admiration of Niko Mitros, I would miss the companionship of the neighborhood boys, even the crybaby Lakis, who was, in fact, my closest friend.

I knew my house and my yard as thoroughly as a prisoner knows his cell, and now that we were to leave, I felt the same foreboding a prisoner might have at suddenly finding his cell door open. My grandparents’ house seemed a sinister place to me, because, even with my grandfather gone, his stern, threatening presence still filled every cranny.

The move from the security of the Perivoli to the Haidis house lower down was the first rent in the fabric of my life, more disturbing to me than the great move that would come later, from Greece to America. By then it didn’t matter what place I left and where I went, because there was no longer a corner left in the world that could seem secure.

The next morning, three security officers arrived at the Gatzoyiannis house shortly after dawn. They were all large and muscular and had the cold eyes of police everywhere.

Worldlessly, the Gatzoyiannis family watched the men enter their house, accompanied by Sotiris Drapetis, who would be in charge of gathering intelligence in the village. Then, driving the animals ahead of them, they made the trip down from the Perivoli for the last time, never looking back.

The arrival of a security police station immediately made a subtle but pervasive change in the atmosphere of Lia. It brought the villagers heady new powers and a universal insecurity. Gossip had always been the spice that seasoned the drabness of village life and made it palatable. On a mountainside where each house overlooks the yard below, nothing can be hidden. If a woman fought with her husband or neglected to do her washing, if two men fell out over a backgammon game, everyone in the village would know it within twenty-four hours and argue the details for a week.

No one was immune to gossip. If a man was not ugly or short, a fool, a drunkard, a cheat, a miser or a cuckold—that is, if there was nothing reprehensible or in any way extraordinary about him—then he would be tarred with the brush of his clan. The grandfather of Lukas Ziaras, for
example, had been a compulsive gambler, a slave to the dice, which is why his last name, Spiropoulos, was forgotten and replaced with
Ziaras
, meaning “dice.” Forever afterward, the Ziaras clan was suspected of having a weakness for gambling.

Village gossip had always been relatively harmless, but the police station suddenly gave it a new importance. Until the arrival of the police, no one really listened to the villagers’ complaints against one another. Now a man could go to them and complain that his neighbor had chests full of corn while everyone else was going hungry, and the very next day a team of guerrillas would burst into the neighbors’ house to confiscate all the corn. If a woman was tired of the constant work details and resenting the fact that her neighbor across the way was called less often, she might go to the security police and say that the other woman had put a stone in her mule’s shoe to make it lame. The neighbor would promptly be arrested and led away. Neither of the informants was any better off than before, but it gave them a sense of power to see how easily their neighbors could be made to suffer. Every day the path to the Perivoli was busy with villagers who had some misbehavior to report, always with the insistence that their names be kept secret. The security police nodded and listened carefully, and after the informant left, they made notes and passed the information on to Sotiris, who wrote it all down in his notebook. Within weeks of the arrival of the security police, the village of Lia was engulfed in paranoia.

The police officers themselves encouraged this fear. They let it be known that favors would be granted to those who reported any words or actions that suggested lack of “cooperation” with the guerrillas. Whenever two or more villagers were seen engaged in conversation, one of the officers would walk up and inquire what they were talking about. Furthermore, it was rumored that the police had Machiavellian machines that could hear the most intimate whispers right through the walls of houses. This was accepted as fact by the villagers, because visitors to the new police station had seen a heavy round machine with a hand crank sitting on the table emitting a sinister hum, no doubt storing up secrets and misdeeds in its insides. They didn’t know that it was only a dry-cell battery to power the telephone.

Because the local men had fled in the wake of the guerrillas, Lia was primarily a village of women and children, so most of the informers were female. Certain women were suspected of earning special favors not only by informing on their neighbors, but also by sharing the guerrillas’ beds. Two women were most frequently accused of collaborating in this way. One was Calliope Bardaka, the pretty, round-faced young widow and devout Communist whose husband had disappeared in 1943, killed by EDES while delivering messages for ELAS, leaving her with two small children to feed. She was seen every day entering the security-police station and was often present as a witness when villagers were called in for questioning. The other was Stavroula Yakou Dangas, the village beauty whose husband Dimitri had returned to his bakery in Khalkis soon after the death of their baby son,
abandoning her to the mercies of her mother-in-law. Although Dimitri Dangas was now fighting with the government forces, his wife was one of the strongest supporters of the guerrillas, who put her in charge of assigning village women and their mules to work details. Calliope Bardaka and Stavroula Yakou quickly became the most feared women in Lia.

The move to the Haidis house left the Gatzoyiannis family desperately short of food. In the Perivoli they had the produce from their garden and, surrounded as they had been by the army’s slaughterhouse, bakery, commissary and warehouses, there were always ways to skim off a bit of the guerrillas’ supplies now and then. Nearly every woman assigned to bake fourteen okas (about 40 pounds) of bread with a ten-oka sack of flour managed to hold back enough to make her own family one loaf, even though the guerrillas weighed the finished bread to prevent this. Hanjaras, the butcher, was not above slipping refuse meat—heads, tripe, brains and entrails—to children who begged winningly. A pretty young woman who was willing to flirt a little, like Rano Athanassiou, could convince the guerrillas to trade her a bit of flour, salt or soap in exchange for eggs.

One of Eleni’s former neighbors was an expert at charming the guerrillas into giving her treats of food, until the presence of the security police dried up nearly all such under-the-table gifts. Kostina Thanassis was a plump, grandmotherly old woman with a jolly disposition whose house, just below the Gatzoyiannis home, was used to store supplies. Kostina fussed over the guerrillas as if they were her own sons, boiling their uniforms to kill the lice, darning their socks and playing on their homesickness. “My golden boy, you’re looking feverish!” she would croon. “Let me brew you a cup of camomile tea. How your poor mother must be worrying about you!”

The guerrillas basked in Kostina’s attentions, repaying her with gifts of unobtainable honey, marmalade and lard. Because the old woman had always made a special pet of Nikola Gatzoyiannis, she would occasionally walk down to the Haidis house with some of these precious items for the boy, which he would share with the whole family.

But without her garden and her proximity to the guerrillas’ commissary, Eleni soon found herself with little corn flour and no salt at all. Kanta, still picky about food, stubbornly refused to eat the unsalted bread on the family’s table. Her mother had exhausted her store of proverbs: “Better today’s bread than tomorrow’s
pita;”
“In a drought even a hailstorm is welcome.” Now, fixing the girl with a look that made her squirm, Eleni announced, “Salt or no salt, you have to eat this bread to survive. And I’m going to see that you survive even if you have to eat roots and slugs!”

Nevertheless, her heart ached for the children as she watched them trying to choke down the tasteless bread. She confided her problem to Angeliki Botsaris Daikos, who lived just above the Haidis house.

“Come with me when I visit my Aunt Soula in the Perivoli,” said Angeliki,
whispering in case any of the security police’s listening devices were beamed her way. “The guerrillas bake all their bread in her cooking shed, and I’m sure she could find you some salt.”

Eleni set out with Angeliki to climb the path to the Perivoli for the first time since the family was evicted. As she passed her own house she was shocked to see the pale faces of prisoners peering out of the small barred windows of her cellar, where the goats had been kept. Six guerrillas lounged about, standing guard. Eleni saw into the courtyard, where a woman in village dress, flanked by a girl of about thirteen, was talking earnestly to a group of guerrillas. The woman wore a long, red-bordered, sleeveless black tunic that showed she came from a village in the Pogoni region. The girl, with wavy russet hair, held her mother’s hand. Eleni watched uneasily, assuming that they had come from a distant village to inquire about one of the prisoners. She moved closer, trying to eavesdrop, but one of the guards at the gate waved her away. “Get along, there’s nothing to look at here,” he ordered. As the two women quickened their pace, Eleni noticed that none of her former neighbors came out of their gates to greet her. A strange silence lay over her old neighborhood.