Eleni (67 page)

“That is a complete lie,” she said.

Katis raised one eyebrow. “What if I told you that among the women you induced to send her children away was Constantina Drouboyiannis?”

Eleni blinked in surprise. She had learned long after the escape that Constantina’s two daughters and their aunt Chrysoula were with those who fled while Constantina was working with Eleni at the harvest. The news had astonished her after the tongue-lashing she had given Lukas for including Alexandra Drouboyiannis and her two daughters on the earlier attempt. How the three new Drouboyiannis women and the Mitros family had come to be on the successful third try was a mystery to her. Her mind raced. If only Lukas had done as she told him and kept the escape a secret between their two families!

Katis brought her out of her thoughts. “Well, answer me! Did you convince Constantina Drouboyiannis to send away her daughters or not?”

“Of course not! It’s totally false.”

“Would you swear to that?”

Eleni stared straight into his mocking eyes. “Yes.”

Katis got up and opened the door. He spoke to a guerrilla standing outside. “Go up to the Amerikana’s house and bring me the icon that hangs in the good chamber at once.”

Tassina Bartzokis, who was still watching the path from her kitchen window, was astonished to see the guerrilla coming by with the Gatzoyiannis’ icon under his arm.

Katis stood before Eleni like a priest, holding the wooden icon of the Virgin and her Child, their heads encircled in hammered gold. It was the image before which Eleni had crossed herself every day of her married life until she had been evicted from her house. Now she stared at the sweet face of the Madonna, praying for guidance.

“Do you swear that you never told Constantina Drouboyiannis to send her daughters along with your family to the fascists?”

Eleni put her hand on the Virgin’s image and felt a shock of fear shoot through her. “I swear it on my life.”

“Swear it on the life of your son,” Katis ordered.

Eleni turned to meet his eyes, not removing her hand from the icon. “I swear it on the life of my boy, Nikola.” Speaking his name made her tears start to flow and she sat down abruptly, huddled in the chair, aware of the cold hollow in her chest and the ache of the welts from the beatings.

Katis put the icon down on his desk and walked to the other door of the small room. He opened it and snapped, “All right, come here.”

Eleni stared as Constantina Drouboyiannis stepped hesitantly into the room. Constantina was a small woman some years older than Eleni, her simple, round face creased with smile lines, but she wasn’t smiling now. She glanced at Eleni nervously, then looked away.

Eleni continued to stare at her curiously. She and Constantina had been working together at the threshing fields on the day of the escape, but they hadn’t exchanged a word. Eleni had never suspected that the woman knew about the escape or that her daughters would be part of it.

She looked hard to see if Constantina had been beaten. There were no signs of cuts from the cornel rods, but her face was bruised, her hair unkempt under her kerchief. Katis pointed to a chair, which Constantina took, turning away from Eleni.

“Look at the Amerikana,” Katis ordered. Constantina did so reluctantly.

Katis addressed Eleni. “I ask you for the last time: Did you know about the escape of your children and did you discuss it with other women in the village?”

Eleni sat with her hands in her lap. The Virgin’s icon was on the desk in front of Katis. She remembered the young guard’s warning that she had to stick to her story if she hoped to save herself.

“I knew nothing about my children’s escape,” she said, looking Katis in the eye. “I’ve told no one in this village to send their children away.”

She heard a choking sound from Constantina and turned to her. For the first time the older woman returned her gaze. “Ach, Eleni,” she sighed. “Now you’ve done it!”

Katis stood up and walked toward Eleni. “You might as well stop lying, Amerikana,” he said in a voice that would have filled a cathedral. “We know everything, and the more you lie, the deeper you dig your grave.”

He turned to Constantina and began snapping out questions: “Didn’t the Amerikana and her family try to leave twice before they finally got away?”

“Yes,” Constantina mumbled, looking at the floor.

“Didn’t they turn back the first time because the Ziaras baby cried?”

“Yes.”

“And didn’t they turn back the second time because of a heavy mist?”

Constantina said nothing but inclined her head. Eleni was staring at her, rigid with shock. They knew about the first two tries! If they had proof, she was finished. But how could Constantina Drouboyiannis have told him? She hadn’t been along either time. She could only have learned the details through village gossip. If she claimed she was with them, she would only incriminate herself. Eleni straightened up in her chair. It would be her word against Constantina’s, and Constantina was only repeating hearsay.

She stared directly at the woman, who seemed to have shrunk in her chair. “Why are you trying to bury me?” Eleni asked her, every word clear as the strokes of a bell.

“I didn’t tell them, Eleni!” Constantina burst out, her eyes overflowing. “They knew everything already, every detail!” Catching hold of herself, she lowered her voice. “Someone else told them, Eleni. It wasn’t my fault!”

Eleni turned to Katis, her cheeks burning. “I never talked to this woman about any escape at any time,” she said. “If she says I did, she’s lying to save herself. I swore on the Virgin’s icon and on my son’s life.”

Katis smiled, evidently pleased at the way things were proceding. Constantina wiped her eyes with the hem of her skirt. Katis stood up and opened the door. “Take the Amerikana back to the security police,” he said to the guards waiting outside. “I think she’s ready to tell us the truth.”

As Eleni was led back up toward her house, her head was throbbing with the effort of trying to work out how she had been betrayed. She could feel the village gossip closing in on her like a net, its menace lurking near her like a shadow clinging to the walls. Who could have told them about the first two escape attempts? Certainly not Alexo or Marianthe, who would be destroying their own defense if they admitted they knew about them. Constantina must have learned about the two abortive attempts from her sister-in-law Alexandra, who had come along on the second effort, but Alexandra would never cut her own throat by confirming the story to the guerrillas. And as long as they had no eyewitness to testify, Eleni told herself, they couldn’t prove she had been there. She struggled up the path, oblivious to the clouds of white cabbage butterflies busy among the patches of yellow broom. She silently prayed to the Virgin that the young guard had been right; if she stuck to her story, she might still save herself.

As she entered the brass-handled gate of the Gatzoyiannis house, Eleni looked up. A woman in a guerrilla uniform was coming out of the door. Her body was stocky, her dark hair cropped into a black frizz. It was Milia Drouboyiannis, one of the most vocal converts to the cause. Eleni remembered Milia shouting over the bull horns before she left for the battlefields, “People of Lia, the Democratic Army has given purpose to my life! I no longer have mother, father and sisters; my family is the Democratic Army!”

But in fact Milia did have a mother: Alexandra Drouboyiannis, who was at that moment being held prisoner in the jail. Suddenly Eleni realized who would know about the first two escape attempts and would be willing—even eager—to report them to the security police. As the small simian figure of Milia strode by, her rifle slung over her shoulder, their eyes met, and in that instant Eleni realized that she was a dead woman.

Eleni was locked back in the small, dirt-floored pantry behind the kitchen, separated from the others, including Alexo and Marianthe, so that she could not tell them what Katis already knew. Then the systematic torture began, designed to strip her of every ounce of resistance she had left. Katis directed Sotiris to use whatever physical punishment was necessary to get a confession out of the Amerikana.

Among the men standing guard around the security prison was a twenty-one-year-old guerrilla named Taki Cotees, a small, prematurely balding youth with the pointed face of a malevolent elf. He remembers seeing a woman in her early forties with light-brown hair being interrogated. “They took her out in the backyard and they beat her,” he recalls, “and finally she confessed to everything.”

While Sotiris fired questions at her, Eleni was tortured by rotating teams of guerrillas. One of the men would stand behind her, place his knee in the small of her back and hook one arm around her throat, pressing forward with his knee while wrenching her body backward until the spine threatened to snap. If the grip of the pulling arm was too tight around the throat, the prisoner would pass out and they would have to wait until she came to before they could start again. The pain traveled up and down Eleni’s spine, and the arm across her throat cut off the air supply, giving her the constant feeling of suffocating. With her body contorted backward at an impossible angle, she gasped for air like a fish and sometimes vomited from the pain. She longed for unconsciousness, but the guerrillas were careful to allow just enough air to prevent that relief.

The beatings took place on the southeast side of the house, where Eleni was surrounded by what had been her own fields and gardens, within sight of the mulberry tree which had been the family’s pride and the gullies where her children had played. She was aware of none of this, only the insistent voices of her torturers above the rising and falling fever of pain that consumed her and the constant silent scream: “When will it stop; when will I die and be finished with it?”

When the beatings were over for the day, they threw her back in the dirt-floored pantry behind the kitchen. There was no light, but Eleni, crouched in a corner, didn’t notice the darkness and the sound of the rats. She became oblivious to her surroundings, her perceptions blurred by the throbbing ache of her body. Sometimes her children’s faces swam before her and she felt a lessening of her pain.

It probably took only a few beatings before Eleni broke. The glimpse of Milia Drouboyiannis had shown her her fate. She was lost, but her children were safe. There was little point in continuing to protest her ignorance of the plot if agreeing to their accusation would stop the torture. Finally she admitted to everything that was true: Yes, she had planned the escape with Lukas Ziaras. Yes, they had set out two times and turned back. But she would not admit to falsehoods: she had never tried to talk anyone else into escaping. The only reason she had sent her children away, she gasped between blows, was that there wasn’t enough food to keep them alive. The guerrillas had taken her house, her gardens and most of her provisions. On the other side of the battle line, the children would be able to receive enough money from their father to survive.

Sotiris seemed satisfied with her statement. He prepared a document enumerating the points Eleni had confessed to and held the pen in her
palsied hand as she signed it. After that they left her in peace on the floor of the small storeroom as the rats rustled in the corner.

Besides Dina Venetis, Marianthe Ziaras is the only surviving witness to what went on inside the security police headquarters and the cellar prison in those first days of August. Like the rest, she was kept isolated for a time after she was rearrested, locked in the small storage room next to the good chamber, which now served as an office. The storage room was directly above the entrance to the cellar and Marianthe found a knothole in the floor through which she could peek at the prisoners in the crowded basement below. Marianthe could see Dina Venetis just beneath her, wedged among other seated prisoners, all with their hands tied in front of them.

Marianthe hissed at Dina Venetis through the hole in the floor until the dark-eyed young woman looked up.

“It’s me, Marianthe Ziaras!” the girl whispered. “They’ve just brought me in.”

Dina and Marianthe were neighbors on the southern edge of the village. Dina asked tensely, “Have you seen my children?”

Marianthe replied that she had seen Dina’s son Vangeli on the path and that he had said, “My mommy’s in jail.” The words made Dina start to cry.

“What are you here for?” Marianthe whispered.

Dina pointed to Andreas Michopoulos, who was cowering, half hidden by the cellar door.

“I’m here because of that miserable boy,” Dina hissed. “He said I asked him how I could escape from the village.” She turned on Andreas. “How could you tell those lies about me and destroy me, leaving my children alone on the road?” she cried, her voice rising.

Andreas huddled farther into the corner and muttered, “Oh, leave me alone, will you! Can’t you see what they’ve done to me?”

Dina turned her attention back to Marianthe. “I’m in here because of my babies,” she said. “If they weren’t so small, I might have done what this vermin accuses me of and tried to leave, but I didn’t.”

At that point she began to sob louder, and Vasili Nikou, the sunburned cooper who was sitting near her, made a sign to Marianthe to be quiet and go away from the peephole. Dina Venetis believes that the guerrillas overheard the conversation between herself and Marianthe and that it made them realize that Andreas’ charges against her were false. “They were always eavesdropping on us—from the doorway, from the windows, from the trap door that led down from the office to the cellar,” she says.

The same day that Marianthe spoke to her, Dina Venetis was called upstairs and interrogated once again by Zeltas, the head of the security police. She sensed a change in his manner toward her.

“From the time I spoke to Marianthe, they knew that I was telling the truth,” Dina Venetis insists. “That’s what saved me.” Others in the village
disagree, saying that Dina saved herself by giving secret testimony against some of the others imprisoned with her in the cellar.

Although she was only eighteen years old, Marianthe Ziaras, the small stocky eldest daughter of Lukas Ziaras, had a stronger will than most grown women. Even though she had been taken by force to be an
andartina
and later was released for suspected disloyalty to the cause, she had become an expert fighter, to the surprise of her instructors. Marianthe had also inherited her father’s quick, devious mind, along with his dark coloring.