Eleni (56 page)

Eleni left her sister without a farewell, just as her father had done to her. Megali’s keening increased in volume as Nitsa turned toward the wall. Fotini and Olga trailed their mother outside, reaching out to touch her. As Eleni started out the gate, Olga grabbed her arm, crying “Wait,
Mana!
I want to kiss you again!” Eleni pulled away and averted her face, hidden in the folds of her kerchief. Olga reached up and pulled down the kerchief, seeing the tears that she had tried to hide. Neither spoke as Olga rose on tiptoe and kissed her mother for the last time.

As Eleni and the two children continued on up the path toward the Perivoli, Olga’s sobbing brought their curious neighbor, Vasilena Karapano, out of her house. She trotted up to take a close look at Olga. “Why on earth are you carrying on like that, child?” she asked. “Your mother’s only going to the wheat fields! What’s the matter with you?”

Megali came out the door and led Olga back into the house.

Eleni, Kanta and Nikola climbed silently up the path toward the Venetis house, now the commissary, which lay next to the old Church of St. Demetrios. The other women, some leading donkeys, were slowly gathering in the yard. Eleni was shocked to see that her sister-in-law Alexo was in the group. The two women exchanged frightened looks but did not speak to each other for fear the guerrillas would notice and remember it when their children escaped.

Eleni settled down on the steps of the house and took the boy in her lap, where he sat quietly. She put her cheek against Nikola’s, breathing in the familiar smell of him, feeling his warmth against her cold skin. Since the day this son was born, his warmth had been there, next to her, his small body like an extension of her own.

A guerrilla came around, taking down the names of the women and giving each one a piece of bread with a slice of thick marmalade. Eleni carefully broke the marmalade in two, handed a piece to Nikola and the other one to Kanta. She put the bread in her pocket.

She moved Nikola back next to her so that she could look at him. He was wearing striped, homemade knee pants with suspenders over a white knitted long shirt. He was barefoot. His hair was clipped short in the village style, golden brown in the sun and uneven where it made a widow’s peak on his wide forehead. Eleni longed to touch him, but she simply looked, trying to burn his features one by one into her memory: the pale scar on his forehead
where he had fallen from the mulberry tree, the square hands and thin dusty legs.

She tried to imagine what he would look like as a man, but she couldn’t. His face now was as open as a flower, his eyebrows drawing together over the deep-set brown eyes. They were rimmed with red, the sign that always told her he was upset or about to come down with something. The corners of his mouth were turned down as if he was going to cry. She thought of all the times she had shrugged off his incessant questions. Who would answer them now?

Eleni turned to Kanta and took a breath. “Tomorrow night, from the moment you leave the house, Nikola will be your responsibility.” she said. “Olga has enough to worry about, so I’m putting him in your care. Protect him like your own eyes.”

Kanta’s face was as pale as her mother’s. “I promise,
Mana
,” she said. “Just come back to us!”

“If I don’t,” Eleni said harshly, “remember this: Anyone who stays in Greece, who doesn’t go to America, will have my curse. When you leave the house, I want you to throw a black stone behind you so you’ll never come back!”

Kanta nodded and swallowed. Eleni turned back to the boy, pulling him against her, trying not to frighten him with the intensity of her embrace. He came obediently into her arms and they sat a moment that way, as she felt his head under her chin and gazed up the hill at the house where he had been born. When he was only days old she had thought he was dying and had him baptized in haste. How much more it hurt to lose him now. They had been everything to each other for too long. No one else knew his fears and hopes or the way he hugged a problem to himself, growing quiet and distracted, until he arrived at a solution. He was always bringing her gifts, producing them out of his pocket like a sacred talisman: an iridescent beetle, speckled plover’s egg, an odd-shaped stone. He would hand it to her, his eyes bright with suspense, waiting for her reaction. What could she give him now to protect him from what lay ahead? She remembered how frightened he had been in the fog. “Tomorrow night,” she whispered, “you must hold Kanta’s hand and be very brave for me.” She felt him nod his head against her breast.

“Everybody up!” shouted a guerrilla, making the three of them jump nervously. “We’re leaving from the Makos house.”

The whole group set out up the hillside. Eleni held Nikola’s hand. When they arrived at the house of Athena Makos, the world fell away below their feet and they could see far to the east, where the women would disappear around the mountain. She turned to look at Nikola and realized he was trying unsuccessfully to smile. “I’ll be brave,
Mana
,” he said.

Eleni looked from Kanta to Nikola, of all her children the two who were most the flesh of her flesh. Then she embraced Kanta.

She felt Nikola’s hand slip back into hers and closed her eyes, praying
for the strength to do what she had to. Then she remembered. She reached up and lifted a large chain from around her neck. It held her most magical possession—a cross-shaped box with a crude figure of Christ inscribed on the front, which held a splinter of bone from a saint. She lifted the chain over the boy’s head, then smoothed his hair with a quick gesture. He frowned in embarrassment.

“Kiss me. This one time,” she said and he moved into her arms. “My blood and heart!” she whispered.

Then she put his hand in Kanta’s and turned away.

It was the look in her eyes as she put the chain around my neck that filled me with the awful knowledge of what she was doing. She was giving me this charm, which felt so heavy on my chest, as a consolation for losing her. I didn’t want the silver cross, I wanted the warmth of her body, the comfort of her face, which was now so white that it seemed I could see through to the bones which pulled the skin taut. She had made me promise to be brave, and I resolved to keep that vow, to be as stalwart as the Spartan boy while the fox gnawed at his bowels, so that she would come back to me.

Kanta was crying, but I stood silent, frowning in the sunlight, as my mother set off down into the ravine, the last woman in line. Every few steps she would turn around as if to reassure herself that we were still there.

Standing on the edge of the great chasm, we watched the dark line of women descend into the depths until they were hidden by the green foliage along the stream flowing through the bottom of the ravine. After about five minutes the serpentine line reappeared on the other side, crawling like a column of ants up to the base of the hill of the Prophet. If I hadn’t known that she was last in line, I never could have recognized her as the small brown-and-black figure that stopped every now and then to look back.

The line of women continued on into the distance, around the base of the hill. There was a spot where the path curved around a myrtle tree and out of sight. I concentrated all my energy on holding my mother in my sight. When she reached the spot where she would disappear from view, she stopped and turned around again. As she looked toward the cliff where she knew we were watching, she raised her hand above her head.

Years later I would have moments, even days, when my mother’s features would blur and grow dim in my memory’s eye, but I never lost the clear image of her gesture and the way she looked on that green and gold summer day when she turned around to wave to me for the last time.

On June 14, 1948, five days before Eleni and the other women from Lia were dispatched to the threshing fields of the Mourgana, the government forces launched the first major attack on the guerrilla headquarters in the Grammos mountains, eighty miles to the northeast of Lia on the Albanian border. The offensive, code-named Operation Coronis, was supposed to capture the insurgent stronghold within two weeks, but the battle would stretch on for seventy-four days, taking an appalling toll in lives, and would ultimately decide the outcome of the civil war.

The guerrillas had chosen a forbidding natural fortress as their refuge. The Grammos range is a series of steep ridges stretching south of the Albanian border, ranging in height from 5,000 to 8,000 feet. There was not even a dirt road around the mountains that the Greek army could use in their attack, but on Grammos’ northern tier in Albania an old road, built by the Italians, ran along its entire thirty-mile length, making it easy for the guerrillas on the summits to be supplied by the Albanians.

General Markos had long been expecting an attack on Grammos, and he had gathered 12,500 of his best fighters there, leaving light forces in other parts of occupied territory. He positioned his men along two lines of defense, two circles of walls that had to be breached before Grammos could be taken. The outer line blocked the passes leading up to the heights, and the inner line, formed by strong, well-camouflaged fortifications, encircled the center of the mountain fortress. The approaches to both rings of defense were lined with dense carpets of mines.

The Greek army sent more than four times the manpower of the guerrillas to attack Grammos: five entire divisions—40,000 men—supported by air force, artillery and commando squadrons. They also had a new weapon, being used in battle for the first time—napalm.

“May the Grammos range become Slavo-Communism’s gravestone,” was the battle cry of the government forces. They planned to surround the guerrillas with two divisions, cutting them off from their supply base in Albania, while three more divisions moved in from the perimeter. But they failed to complete the circle along the Albanian border or to breach the guerrillas’ outer defense wall. The Greek army’s general staff then tried a new strategy: direct frontal attacks by all five divisions. Finally a fifteen-mile hole was broken through the outer defense line, and the attackers moved toward the inner wall around the main guerrilla base. By that time the slopes around it looked, according to one observer, as if they had been “fried in napalm.”

The critical battle raging at Grammos created frenetic activity among the guerrillas stationed in the Mourgana villages. They had to provide sanctuary for raiding parties sent to strike at the enemy communications deep inside nationalist territory; they engaged the soldiers on the rim of ridges to the south to keep them from being sent to reinforce the army’s divisions on Grammos, and every night raiding parties crept across the foothills to harass and snipe at the soldiers. It was also the Mourgana guerrillas’ responsibility to mobilize civilians to harvest the wheat, beans and other grains critical for the survival of the beleaguered fighters to the northeast. The Grammos range was the vital core of the DAG, and to protect it, every able-bodied person in the occupied villages had to be thrown into the effort.

A
S THE FILE OF WOMEN
struggled over the mountaintops toward the threshing fields to the northeast, Eleni tried to concentrate on her approaching reunion with Glykeria, but she was remembering the image of her son standing on the edge of the cliff, thinking how vulnerable he looked to the dangers he had to survive if she would ever see him again.