Eleni (60 page)

Shuddering in the chill wind, they all sat and contemplated the monumental shape of the Great Ridge. The children fell asleep on the adults’ laps, but for the rest the waiting was worse than the walking had been. They were on the very edge of salvation, but they felt more vulnerable now than at any time since they emerged from the wheat field. Their eyes burning with fatigue and the effort of staring into the darkness, they sat in silence, wrapping themselves in their prayers, waiting for the sun.

The guerrilla patrol led by Vasili Bokas followed the ravine to its end and hurried straight on until they, too, reached the edge of the Great Ridge at the place called “The Apple Trees.” From the shadows of the forest they peered out onto the slope leading up the height.

“We can’t go any farther without being seen,” said one of the guerrillas. “The traitors must have made it over to the other side.”

“No, they’re somewhere in the forest doing the same thing we’re doing: waiting,” replied Bokas. “They can’t risk going out there and getting shot any more than we can. I want three men to search all along the edge of the trees. We have until dawn to find them.”

Nikola woke, his head in Kanta’s lap. He had been dreaming that his mother was calling to him. The sound of her voice speaking his name still echoed in his ears. She had been trying to tell him something, and he knew it was vital to understand what it was. But she faded before he could make out her words.

He sat up and heard voices—men’s voices—and the sound of twigs snapping in the forest to their right. Everyone heard it and they sat frozen, listening. Then the voices began to fade and the sound of footsteps became more distant. Tassi Mitros spoke with quiet fatalism. “There’s nothing we can do now,” he whispered; “what is written will happen.” After that, no one dozed and they all watched as the silhouette of the Great Ridge slowly took shape against the pre-dawn sky.

First the heavens were inky purple, then slowly they paled to lavender,
the colors unfolding like a peacock’s tail, and from the east a pink finger of light touched the summit of the ridge, dappling the rocks and knolls with the shades of burnished copper. The warm colors of the dawn only emphasized the cold that gripped them. The slope of the ridge appeared lifeless. As the light grew stronger, they could make out great, gnarled tangles of barbed wire barring them from the heights which Lukas had told them were mined. They had come out exactly where he intended, Lukas noted proudly.

Lukas began to bustle about, making plans for their triumphal exodus from the periphery of the forest into the clearing. They had to attract the attention of the soldiers and convince them it was not a guerrilla ambush. The soldiers were justifiably suspicious, he knew. Although an occasional escaping peasant or defector from the DAG managed to reach them, it was a common trick to send
andartinas
dressed as peasant girls to beg for sanctuary and then, when the soldiers came out of their foxholes, the
andartinas’
hidden comrades would open fire while the women themselves hurled grenades.

Lukas selected the two oldest women in the group, Megali Haidis and Calliope Mitros, to go forward waving the white flag of surrender. The nationalist troops could hardly suspect two women well past middle age to be
andartinas
. But both firmly refused to leave the shelter of the forest. “We’ll step on a mine! They’ll shoot us down before we can open our mouths!” Calliope wailed while Megali just sat and rocked and moaned. Next Lukas pleaded with Nitsa and Arete, but they were equally unwilling. “I’m all alone; my husband has no one else!” cried Arete. “Take a woman from a large family.”

Nitsa used the excuse of her pregnancy once again, and added that after the traumas of the night she was too ill to walk, much less risk the mine fields.

Finally Chrysoula Drouboyiannis stood up, a figure of impressive height and stature, and volunteered to go first. “I have no children,” she said. “As long as you save my nieces, I’m willing to risk it.” She begged Olga to come along with her. “Your voice will carry all the way up the ridge.” Olga looked around, blushing, then reluctantly agreed.

Both women went behind a bush and removed their slips, tearing them into rags and attaching them to branches to make white flags. Olga mournfully fingered the fine lace of the best slip from her trousseau before she ripped it apart.

As the rest of the group watched tensely from their hiding places, Olga and Chrysoula emerged from the woods, waving their makeshift flags and shouting at the top of their voices, “Soldiers! Brothers! Save us! We’ve escaped from Lia! Please come and help us!” The silent, barren hulk of the ridge yielded no answer.

They walked forward gingerly, Olga carefully placing her feet where Chrysoula had stepped. After a few paces they came to a halt and redoubled their screams. They stared upward and finally saw a small figure appear on
a shelf partway up the height. “Stop right there!” he shouted. “Don’t come any farther! Who are you?”

“We’re women and children from Lia!” Olga shrieked, her knees visibly starting to shake. “We escaped from the guerrillas!”

She squinted, not certain from this distance whether she was talking to a soldier or to a guerrilla who was trying to trick her.

“No one’s coming down. You come up here!” shouted the man.

“But we’re afraid of the mines,” cried Chrysoula.

“Just come straight ahead, through the gap in the barbed wire, straight toward me, and you’ll be all right,” he called.

Chrysoula and Olga took a few faltering steps forward. Behind them from out of the trees emerged Lukas Ziaras, followed by his wife with the baby on her back; three small children behind her. Next came Kanta leading two more children; Megali tottering behind, Arete leading the Drouboyiannis girls; Nitsa, with her two kerchiefs wrapped around her feet, crawling up the slope on all fours; Gakis and Niko Mitros on either side of their mother. Finally Tassi Mitros appeared, a gnarled giant nervously bringing up the rear. It was an astonishing sight. From behind every rock on the Great Ridge, soldiers’ heads popped up, gaping in amazement. Olga could see as she came closer that they really were soldiers, not guerrillas; they all wore the two-cornered khaki cap with the crown on it.

The sun had already heated the naked limestone of the Great Ridge until it burned their feet, and as Nikola stepped on a rock he heard a sizzling sound. He looked around and whimpered when he realized that it was his own blood from the cuts on his bare feet bubbling on the hot surface. A trail of bloody footprints stretched behind him.

The bizarre parade straggling out of the trees drew the astonished soldiers from their foxholes on the Great Ridge, but there was another hidden audience: the five guerrillas concealed in the place called The Apple Trees. The leader of the patrol, Vasili Bokas, watched in growing disbelief. His frantic commanding officer had told him that the Mitros and Ziaras families had escaped, but he had never expected to see a crowd like this. He recognized Lukas Ziaras at the head, then focused on the children and young women behind and emitted a low whistle. First he recognized Chrysoula Drouboyiannis by her unusual height, then he took a good look at the rest. The family of the Amerikana was with them! Bokas winced as he imagined the reaction of his officers to the news that the children of the most respected family in Lia were among the defectors.

“They’re right out in the open,” said the man beside him, raising his machine gun. Bokas shook his head. “It’s too far, and the fascists will have a dozen bazookas on us in a second,” he whispered. Silently he watched the long string of figures stumbling higher up the ridge.

He felt a secret relief that he hadn’t caught the fugitives, Bokas confided to a friend thirty years later, shortly before his death. Although he was loyal to the cause, he had no stomach for killing women and children from his own village. As he watched the soldiers come down to meet them, the
guerrilla shook his head in wonder. “Imagine Lukas Ziaras leading out such a crowd and getting away with it!” he muttered to himself.

The small, sallow tinker approached the government soldiers, then he stopped for a moment, and removing the white towel wrapped around his neck, threw it away with a sweeping gesture of triumph.

The first soldier to reach them seized Lukas’ arm. He couldn’t believe that such a crowd could have slipped away unseen. “Did the Communists let you leave?” he demanded. “Are they evacuating the villages?”

It was the proudest moment of Lukas Ziaras’ life. He described to the growing assemblage of soldiers how he had personally led the refugees to freedom through the guerrilla patrols, thanks to his knowledge of the terrain and his carefully plotted escape plan. The grizzled miller stood by listening cynically and spat on the ground.

By the time the group reached the top of the Great Ridge, a major and all the officers of the battalion were waiting for them, their faces dark with suspicion. They wrote down the names of all the fugitives, then they took aside the three men—Lukas Ziaras, Tassi and Gakis Mitros—to interrogate them. A few minutes later they also sent for Kanta, having learned from the men that she had once been an
andartina
.

While those four were being questioned, the soldiers stood around the rest of the group, examining them like creatures in a zoo. Seeing the hunger and fatigue on the faces of the children, some of the soldiers brewed mountain tea for them over small cooking fires. As Nikola held a heavy tin cup of tea in his hands and drank, a soldier offered him a piece of the soft white bread called
kouramada
, a delicacy he could hardly remember. The boy gobbled half of it and tucked the rest in his pocket, thinking he would share it with his mother when she reached Filiates. He imagined describing to her the adventures of the past night and how pleased she would be at his bravery.

The sight of the cooking fires reminded Olga of her promise to her mother and she walked over to the major. “Please, sir,” she said, “We have people back there who are waiting for a signal that we’re safe so they can escape too. We have to light a large smoky fire so that they’ll know we’ve made it.”

“Impossible!” snapped the major. “A signal fire would be an open invitation to the Communists to hit us with every mortar they have.”

“But we have to!” Olga pleaded. “How will my mother and sister know we’ve escaped?”

“No signal fires,” repeated the officer and turned his back. The subject was closed.

The twenty fugitives spent the whole day in the nationalist encampment at the top of the Great Ridge, and that night they slept in the soldiers’ tents. “You’ll have to be patient; we have to run a check on all of you through Alpha Two,” one of the soldiers told Olga, referring to the intelligence branch of the Greek army.

Early the next morning word came back from army headquarters. The
refugees from Lia were to be escorted to the village of Aghies Pantes (All Saints) where the road began. From there army trucks would transport them to refugee facilities in Filiates. The fugitives climbed to their feet, energized by the thought of being reunited with relatives on the other side. Only Nitsa refused to get up, insisting she could not walk another step. She sat there adamant as a mule until the soldiers relented and provided a large black horse for her. Then the barefoot parade set out on their hour-long walk down from the Great Ridge, with Nitsa riding at the head like an empress, her stocky body rocking from side to side, her kerchief-bound feet protruding at a sharp angle from her ballooning abdomen.

The sun came out from behind a cloud and its warmth revived them. The mist rose from the valley below like incense, and the heavy fragrance of late pears, laurel and osiers affected their senses like wine. Suddenly it struck all of the fugitives that they were really free. The nightmare was over and they had survived. Like a silken ribbon, Arete’s voice rose into the air. “When shall we go to the city,” she sang, the words of an ancient lullaby, “to buy golden rings and pearls for my lady’s dowry, silver bangles for her ears and perfumes for her hands?” One by one the voices of the other women joined in. At last they really were going to the city to see the wonders there.

The children began to laugh and walk hand in hand in time to the music. Soon they were all singing, swinging their hands and smiling as if it were Easter Sunday. Then the cry of Soula Ziaras rose like a malediction over the music. “It’s not right!” she shouted. “How can we sing when my girl and my cousin Eleni are still trapped back there? We’re free, but what’s going to happen to them?”

At her words Nikola turned and looked back toward Lia, but the Great Ridge blocked the view of his mountains. He saw that the universe had been turned upside down: all his life he had stood at the top of the world, the valleys and foothills spread out far below. Now he was walking in an abyss between two rows of strange mountains which seemed about to fall in on him. Soula’s words chilled his heart; for the first time he understood that his mother might never get away. The bulwark of stoicism which he had constructed suddenly crumpled and the tears that he had held back since his mother left him overflowed.

“Mother, Glykeria and Marianthe will be fine!” Kanta said soothingly. “They’ll turn up in Filiates, you’ll see.” But the euphoria of the fugitives was gone, and they walked on in silence, following the soldiers until they reached Aghies Pantes shortly before noon.

The people of that village crowded around shouting questions about relatives and friends trapped in the occupied territory. The commotion frightened the children, who shrank against their parents. The little town, where the road began, seemed huge to them, and the soldiers herded their frightened charges over to a large, mud-colored army truck. The Liotes stared at it curiously. The children had never seen a vehicle with wheels and
they had no idea what it was for. The back of the truck had metal arches with canvas stretched over them to form a tent, but the canvas flaps were rolled up and tied. They walked around the truck, touching its metal hide with tentative fingers. The headlights looked to Nikola like eyes, but the creature seemed to be dead or sleeping.