Eleni (69 page)

Marianthe knocked at her grandmother’s door, hoping to get a change of clothes, for her red wool skirt would attract the searchers’ eyes like a
signal flare, but the old woman peered out the door and hissed, “Run, child, quickly! They’re everywhere around looking for you!”

“At least give me some bread!” Marianthe pleaded, but her grandmother snapped, “I won’t give you anything. Get out of here!”

Weeping, Marianthe ran back to the shack full of corn for lack of anywhere else to go, but someone must have seen her, for within minutes after she burrowed back to the very bottom of the pile she heard guerrillas firing their guns in the darkness and shouting, “Marianthe, come out! We know you’re here! If you come out nothing will happen to you, but if we have to find you, you’ll wish you’d never been born!”

A pair of guerrillas even opened the door of the tiny shed in which she was hiding and looked in, but as Marianthe braced herself for a bullet, they closed the door and sat down outside, leaning against it. They stayed there for the rest of the night while Marianthe listened to every word they said and prayed to the Virgin that the dust of the corn wouldn’t make her sneeze. Curled into a ball deep under the corn, she had no idea when it became light, but after many hours she heard church bells. “Let’s go,” she heard one of the guerrillas say. “Either she’s gotten away or one of the bullets has found her.”

When they were gone, Marianthe crept out of the shed. She hadn’t eaten or slept for forty-eight hours. She saw a path and prayed: “Mother of God, let this lead me to the Great Ridge.”

She walked for six hours without being seen, and passed two rotting corpses among the roots of trees—whether the bodies of guerrillas or soldiers she couldn’t tell as she turned away from their eyeless faces grinning at her. When she finally emerged at the Great Ridge and hailed the nationalist soldiers camped on its summit, they refused to believe that the girl wasn’t an
andartina
. They made her advance with her arms over her head, still clutching her shoes.

The first three soldiers she reached stared at her in astonishment. “Why are you carrying your shoes instead of wearing them?” they asked.

Marianthe couldn’t find her voice to answer and stood there dumb, tears pouring down her cheeks. She finally managed to say that she was the daughter of Lukas Ziaras and had escaped from the guerrillas’ jail in Lia. The soldiers found it incredible that anyone, and a girl to boot, could do such a thing. Marianthe held out her arms, showing the burns and blisters of the ropes that had bound her for so many days that the flesh was gray. “My hands are my witnesses,” she said.

They finally believed her, and one of the soldiers reached out to take the shoes clutched in her hand. She had been holding them for so long that she couldn’t let go and they had to pry her fingers open.

A search party of village women found Andreas Michopoulos crouching in a field near his house, devouring a cucumber that he had stolen, nearly mad
from hunger and thirst. Xantho Stamou, the first woman to see him hiding behind a bush, hesitated for a moment under his pleading gaze. But several months before, Xantho had been arrested, beaten and interrogated herself on charges of encouraging young women in her husband’s nearby village to escape; and as she stood there, uncertain about what to do, she thought that it could mean her own death if she didn’t sound the alarm. She stared back at Andreas’ swollen red eyes in his gray face, the sagging jaw, the half-eaten cucumber frozen halfway to his mouth. The ragged boy trembled as if he had a fever and shook his head beseechingly. Xantho raised her hand and pointed. “It’s Andreas Michopoulos!” she screamed to the other women. “Come quick! I’ve found him!”

Eleni, now being held in the kitchen, heard the outburst of activity among the guerrillas when the escape was discovered. Like the prisoners in the basement she listened to the shouts and gunfire that rang through the village for the next day and night, torn between hope that the fugitives would get away and terror that the remaining captives would be made to pay for their flight.

On the second morning after their disappearance, Eleni watched from the kitchen window as Andreas Michopoulos was dragged between several guerrillas back through the gates of the security headquarters, his feet trailing in the dust.

The guerrillas made sure that all the prisoners witnessed Andreas’ punishment. In the front yard, in clear view of the cellar and kitchen windows, they stripped him naked and tied him to a log, the way a sheep or goat would be trussed for roasting. They suspended the log between two notched supports so that they could turn the boy’s body around, as a goat is turned to be basted. Then his former comrades took turns beating Andreas with wooden sticks, turning him this way and that to find spots which were not already livid with bruises. When their arms tired, they left him there in the August sun, and soon his body was black. His tongue was protruding from his mouth, but he was still making sounds. He moaned like an ox, covered with blood which clotted his hair and mixed with the mucus running from his nose and mouth.

Eleni tried not to look or listen to the young guerrilla’s punishment, but she was constantly drawn to the window with a perverse fascination. She could feel the impact of the wooden rods on his bare flesh and could see the skin puffing. She prayed that he would die.

She lingered at the window when the sun began to set, shadows mercifully creeping over the shape suspended in her yard. In the distance the mountains shone as a soft yellow cloud spread its wings above the sunset until it blazed up into the color of autumn leaves.

She continued to stand there as the light ebbed and died and a full August moon slowly rose above the cypress trees around the churchyard of St. Demetrios. The azure sky paled and the purple shadows of the trees crept
like fingers over the immobile body on the spit while the foothills in the distance were bathed with a cold luminousness. Between the slender forms of the cypresses, an infinity of stars winked at her like jasmine blossoms. A heavy silence hung over the world.

It was while watching Andreas’ punishment that Eleni first came to the realization that death could be a solace, to be embraced like a lover. At the beginning, she had passed every hour starved for the love of her children, a love which had unceasingly nourished her soul. For days now she had forced herself to put the thought of the children away from her and to prepare for the journey into the other world. She felt the presence of her long-dead mother-in-law, Fotini, drawing near to her, brushing her eyelids as she slept, and tried to draw comfort from that. But now a new fear seized her, creeping out of the shadows below. Eleni whispered a prayer that her own death would be swift. She had always been so careful to conduct her life with decorum and self-control, and she prayed to die the same way, like a human being, not an animal.

The prisoners in the cellar expected their treatment to deteriorate in retaliation for the escape of Marianthe and Andreas, but to their surprise, in the days that followed it became marginally better than it had been before. The change was infinitesimal, but to captives with nothing to do but analyze every gesture and word of their jailers, it seemed profoundly significant.

After twenty-four hours Andreas was taken down from the spit. A few days later he was returned to the cellar, and the other prisoners saw that he had been dressed in fresh clothing and his wounds had been tended. He slumped in a corner, silent and in a stupor, but he was alive.

The regular beatings of prisoners stopped except for an occasional kick or blow from a guard. Relatives were permitted to bring food to the captives. Although no adults were allowed inside the cellar to see them, some days after the escape Niki Gatzoyiannis, Alexo’s young daughter, was allowed to speak to her mother.

Niki had come to the prison many times with food for Alexo and each time the guards had taken the plate away from her, torn any bread into small pieces to make sure nothing was concealed inside, and told her to come back for the empty dish the next morning. But one day in mid-August the guards told Niki she could see her mother. They led Alexo out the cellar door into the yard, where she blinked in the sunlight. Niki ran forward to embrace her, but Alexo made a sign for her to stay some distance away. “Don’t come near me, sweetheart!” she said. “I’m covered with lice.” Niki stopped, suspecting that her mother didn’t want her to see how badly she had been beaten. Under the eyes of the guards they exchanged a few lame words about the house and the flocks, trying to stay calm, then Alexo tearfully thanked her daughter for the food and was led back into the darkness of the cellar. Niki saw no sign of her aunt Eleni.

From her vantage point in the kitchen window, Eleni watched the encounter
between Niki and Alexo, and it set her to worrying about what had happened to Glykeria. She began to wonder if the girl had been arrested in the threshing fields, and beaten to elicit information about her mother’s complicity in the mass escape.

The food fed to the prisoners began to improve and they were permitted to receive changes of clothing brought by relatives. For several nights after the punishment of Andreas, no one was taken out to the garden to be executed. The captives’ hands were inexplicably untied.

On the fourth day after Marianthe’s disappearance, Sotiris appeared in the cellar early in the morning and called the names of the prisoners from Lia: Dina Venetis, Alexo Gatzoyiannis, Andreas Michopoulos, Spiro Michopoulos and Vasili Nikou. As they stared at each other in terror, he ordered them brought upstairs. No prisoners had ever been taken up for execution in the morning, they thought. If they were to be interrogated and beaten again, surely they wouldn’t all be taken together.

Sotiris and the guards led the five up the stairs into the police office. The brass bed gleamed, the icon hung in the eastern corner and the gramophone was in its accustomed place. Waiting for them in the room were two more fellow villagers: Eleni Gatzoyiannis and Constantina Drouboyiannis. Relieved at seeing that Eleni was all right, Alexo ran to embrace her.

At an order from Sotiris, the guerrillas began to tie the prisoners together in pairs. Eleni and Alexo were bound hand to hand. Spiro Michopoulos was tied to his nephew Andreas, who could barely stand up. Vasili Nikou was tied to Dina Venetis. The only prisoner left unfettered was Constantina Drouboyiannis.

When all the prisoners were tied together, Sotiris cleared his throat. “Today your fate will be put in the hands of the people’s justice,” he said. “You will have the benefit of a public trial before all your fellow villagers. Evidence will be given against you, witnesses will be called, and you will be allowed to defend yourselves against the charges. You will see that the Democratic Army does not punish the innocent, only the guilty.”

He signaled to the guards, then said tensely, “Come along now, the judges have arrived.”

By mid-August it was clear even to Communist Party leader Nikos Zachariadis that Grammos was lost. The guerrilla fighters had tried everything: rolling improvised mines down the slopes onto the enemy, leaving booby-trapped mules to wander the hillsides, starting landslides of rocks, but by August 17, the 9,000 surviving guerrillas were trapped on the very top of Grammos with 90,000 government soldiers surrounding them. After eight weeks of savage fighting, with a loss of life on both sides that horrified the foreign correspondents covering the battle, the guerrillas had no choice but to retreat.

At the headquarters of the exhausted survivors, Nikos Zachariadis and Markos Vafiadis were once again at loggerheads, arguing over the method of retreat. General Markos urged that they break through the enemy encirclement to the north and disperse their units to harass government forces throughout the region. Zachariadis was advocating a push eastward to the Vitsi range, where the guerrillas could entrench themselves along the Yugoslav border. If they did so, he knew, and were ultimately defeated, he could always blame the loss of the war on lack of support from Tito.

Zachariadis got his way as usual. Before dawn on August 21, the guerrillas managed to break through the enemy lines and slip off, carrying their wounded, toward Vitsi.

Zachariadis refused to admit that the loss of Grammos was the result of his misguided strategy. Instead, he laid the blame on the performance of Markos’ officers, who, he said, had been derelict in their duty. Among the most tempting scapegoats for Zachariadis to name was Colonel Yiorgios Yannoulis, a tall, ascetic-looking young lawyer who had fought bravely throughout the German occupation, with a skill that made him rise swiftly in the Communist ranks. When the attack on Grammos was begun, he led his men to infiltrate the enemy
lines with exceptional mobility and daring, and cut the government troops’ supply and communication arteries. Later Yannoulis was given the heights of Batras to defend on the western slope of Grammos and was ordered to hold it to the death. He complied until his brigade had been whittled down to only fifty survivors, then he led them in an expert withdrawal.

But Zachariadis badly needed villains on whom to blame the Grammos defeat, and Yannoulis served his purpose well. He was closely associated with Markos, having worked with him from the outbreak of the civil war, organizing units in Macedonia. If the young colonel was labeled a traitor, it would impugn Markos and his supporters as well.