Eleni (5 page)

This was something I had to resolve: perhaps the villagers really were more culpable for her death than the men who passed the sentence and fired the bullets. I wondered if something about my mother incited the people of Lia to offer her up like a sacrificial lamb. Or perhaps the villagers had only been manipulated by the guerrillas, who exploited their moral weaknesses, petty jealousies and fears, because the guerrillas wanted my mother killed for some political purpose. What was the real reason that she was executed?

The beauty of the village all around me, the familiar tang of wood smoke and the music of goats’ bells in the air, seemed to refute my suspicions. I passed through the square and stopped near the western boundary of Lia. I left the car at the foot of the path that led up the mountain toward our old neighborhood and the Church of St. Demetrios.

It was August 6, the feast day of the Transfiguration, one of the three times a year when the church was used for a service. As I climbed, I saw elderly worshipers approaching from all directions.

The sun was high, but inside, the church was dark and filled with shadowy
figures in somber clothing. The gnarled faces and the gold of the ancient carved altar screen shone in the candlelight. I stood for a while outside the church door beneath the cypress trees, listening to the priest’s chanting and the indistinct voice of an old woman who was seated cross-legged next to a recent grave, carrying on a conversation with the dead.

The door to the ossuary stood open, but I didn’t go in. I knew that none of the answers I needed would be found inside the wooden box that held my mother’s bones. She was frozen in my memory as I had known her from the perspective of a child; a source of unfailing strength, security and love. But in delving into the events of her last years, I had begun to glimpse a more complex and ambiguous person, a troubled peasant woman who tried to live by the rules of the primitive mountain culture that constituted her world, and when they failed her, defied them.

My mother had scarcely gone to school; she put on the kerchief at the age of eleven like every other village girl, and from that moment never dared to speak to a man until the day she was handed over as a bride to a husband she didn’t know. The politics that shattered her universe during the last decade of her life made no sense to her. She never traveled farther than the provincial capital. Her husband lived half a world away in a country that she longed to see but knew nothing about, although she was branded, because of her marriage, with the name “the Amerikana” and all the prejudices that came with it.

My mother’s world was ruled by magic, superstition, ghosts and devils to be invoked or appeased by holy oil and charms, but these were not enough to save her and her children from the war that swept into their mountains. When she saw that living by the strict village canons was not enough, when it became a choice between losing her children or her life, she discovered a strength that I now know is given to few.

Before my search was over I had to find my mother, to see her with the eyes of an adult, and to uncover her secret feelings about the world that caged her. I had to do this in order to learn how she wanted me to deal with her murderers. I had to communicate with her across the chasm of death to discover if, as she climbed toward that ravine to her execution, she was Antigone, meeting death with resignation because she had purposely defied a human command to honor a higher law of the heart, or if she was Hecuba, crying out for vengeance. What did she want me to do?

Interrupting my reflections, over the priest’s singsong and the chanter’s responses, rose a mechanical roar that I had never heard as a boy. It came from above, in the direction of my house. I started up the path leading from the churchyard.

I found the house a complete ruin, overgrown with ivy, deserted except for lizards; the roof and floor collapsing into the cellar. I discovered the source of the noise: it was a bulldozer at work, extending a horizontal path for a road across the lower boundary of what had been our garden. The low stone wall around the property had disappeared and the remaining walls of the house stared with empty eye sockets at the monster shaving away
another great swath of red soil, perilously close to the lone mulberry tree that had been our landmark.

Although the house was a grim monument to the killings that had taken place there, I realized that I wanted that mulberry tree to survive. I motioned to the bulldozer operator to stop and then went over and asked him to cut around the tree, that piece of my childhood.

As the machine set to work again, I walked over to the house, looking down for the first time into the exposed cellar where my mother and so many others had spent their last hours.

The mulberry tree and all the pleasant memories clinging to its branches made me understand that my search would give me as much joy as sorrow. This was the house where Eleni Gatzoyiannis suffered and died, but it was also the house where she was brought as a nineteen-year-old bride, where my sisters and I were born, where we played and fought. The terrace was still there, where my mother would bring her hand-turned sewing machine outside on warm evenings to take advantage of the breeze and look up occasionally from her work to gaze at the valley stretching away below her. We were hungry there but we were happy, too, and our memories would outlast the house. “We have eaten bread and salt together,” the Greeks say, meaning that we have shared the most elemental foods, suffered the same hardships, known the same joys, and that nothing can ever break that bond that ties us together, not even death.

I would have to rebuild this house, stone by stone, in my imagination, before I could face Katis and the others. I would have to re-create her lost village—a mysterious world as faded now as a tapestry from the Middle Ages, with only a face visible here, an arm there. When I had re-made it, weaving it from the memories of scores of different witnesses, then I would have reached the end of my search for my mother. I would understand what it was that she wanted me to know as she left our gate for the last time to climb to the ravine.

The witnesses to my mother’s fate were a generation of leaves scattered by winds of war all over the world—Canada, the United States, England, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and every corner of Greece. I had to track them down and use all my professional skill to get the truth from them.

In the course of the journey I would find not only my mother but myself. By re-creating the last decade of her life, I would learn how much I had been formed by that now-dead world. Whatever I decided I must do to my mother’s killers, was I capable of it? Others in my place were unable to find the will to claim vengeance. Did I have that will?

When I had uncovered the answer, which lay buried somewhere in the ruins of my house and my childhood, then I would be ready to confront Katis and the rest. But my search had to begin with the discovery of a dead woman and the child who walked out of this mountain over three decades ago. I had to find the story not only of my mother’s death, but of her life as well. And to do that I had to go back to the autumn of 1940.

In the mountain villages of northern Greece, life moves to the slow rhythm of the seasons, punctuated now and then by the feast days of the saints. October culminates in the feast of St. Demetrios, which marks the end of summer, when the fattened goats and sheep are brought down from the mountain pastures and shut up in the basements under the stone houses for the winter.

But sometimes the saint comes clothed in a brief reprise of fine weather, the “little summer of St. Demetrios”: a last blaze of gold before winter locks the villagers into their huts. October of 1940 brought such a respite to the hamlets of the Mourgana mountain range, along the northwestern border of Greece, and the villagers took advantage of it to store the autumn harvest: children gathered walnuts, men sorted over the amber and amethyst grapes for the wine making, women strung garlands of dried beans, peppers, onions and garlic to hang from the rafters. The sunshine splashed the mountainside with butter-yellow autumn crocuses, gilded beech trees rustled with ghosts, and everywhere, pomegranates, squashes and pumpkins glowed like miniature suns.

In Athens the social season was in full swing and the Italian ambassador there, Count Emilio Grazzi, was planning an elegant midnight reception at the legation after a special performance of
Madame Butterfly
to honor the visiting son of Giacomo Puccini. The Greek royal family and the prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, were expected to attend the opera.

In Rome, Benito Mussolini was sulking. The dictator complained to his son-in-law, who was also his foreign minister, that Hitler was humiliating him by the conquests he was making in Europe without even consulting him. It was not until three days after the seizure of Rumania that Hitler got around to writing his ally about it. “Hitler
keeps confronting me with
faits accomplis,”
Mussolini ranted to his son-in-law. “This time I shall pay him back in his own coin; he shall learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece!”

As the social elite of Athens moved among tables decorated with intertwined Greek and Italian flags and banners reading “Long Live Greece,” a coded telegram from Rome began to arrive at the legation. The Italian staff members deciphering it stopped now and then, their faces pale, to mingle with the Greek guests so that nothing would seem amiss. The message was an ultimatum which the horrified Grazzi was to deliver to Metaxas, demanding that Italian troops be allowed to occupy his country.

At three o’clock on the morning of October 28 Grazzi woke up Metaxas, who received him in dressing gown and slippers, and handed him the ultimatum. Mussolini had given the Greek prime minister three hours to reply. The two men spoke in French. Metaxas’ hands trembled as he looked up from the paper and rejected the ultimatum with the words
“Alors, c’est la guerre!”

Popular legend has condensed Metaxas’ refusal into the single word
“Ochi!”
(“No!”), which has become a Greek battle cry that blooms defiantly every October 28 on walls throughout Greece. It is permanently emblazoned in ten-foot-high letters of white stone on a peak of the Mourgana range above a small village called Lia in the northwestern corner of Greece, just below the Albanian border.

But Mussolini didn’t wait for Metaxas’ reply. Before the ultimatum had expired, five heavily armed divisions of Italian soldiers began moving from Albania over the border into Greece.

I
T WAS DURING
the little summer of St. Demetrios in 1940 that Eleni Gatzoyiannis attended the disinterment of the bones of her mother-in-law, Fotini Gatzoyiannis, in the village of Lia.

Eleni had lived with Fotini for almost ten years, from the day she was brought to the woman’s home as a nineteen-year-old bride by Fotini’s fifth son, Christos. She had held her mother-in-law’s hand when she died, worn out by eighty-four years of life and the birth of nine children. Five years had passed since Fotini’s death and it would not be easy to watch the bones taken from the earth, washed and stored in the church ossuary, but in Greece, even in a mountain village of 787 people, grave plots were few and could be occupied only temporarily.