Eleni (86 page)

After Alexo’s execution, my uncle took a third wife, forty years his junior, who cares for his house, animals and garden, leaving him free to enjoy his longevity. It bothers Foto not at all to drink at the same table as villagers who testified against Alexo at her trial.

My father, Christos, remarkably like his brother in appearance but entirely different in character, seemed to share Foto’s vitality, but as he approached his nineties, his health began to fail. He can no longer drive his Oldsmobile around Worcester to pay calls on his vast circle of relatives and admirers. While Foto seems destined to live forever, my father is now frail, his mind wandering among the tragedies of the old years, unable to walk, his heart and lungs failing.

My uncle often brags that he has lived so long by tossing the tragedies of his life behind him, but my father gradually became increasingly obsessed with the unfairness of my mother’s death. In that way, I resemble him.

During the years I lived in Greece as a journalist, I was constantly drawn back to Lia. The village was slowly dying; only a few hundred old people were left behind as their children moved to the metropolitan centers in search of a better life. I began to undertake projects to revitalize the village: finding government money for a new water system, setting up a development company that would use donations from American Liotes to rebuild village landmarks, and raising the funds to construct a ten-room inn with a restaurant and a shop to sell the local crafts of tinworking and wood carving, which were in danger of dying out.

At first I didn’t stop to think about why I was undertaking these projects until one day I was told a remark my uncle Andreas had made. Someone said to him, “It’s a wonderful thing that Nikola is doing for the people of the village,” and he replied with heavy sarcasm, “Well, of course, he owes it to them! After all, they killed his mother!”

When I stopped to examine my motives, I realized that I was unconsciously trying to build a monument to my mother that would reflect the charitable acts she had done in the village—a monument that could not be torn down or defaced like a gravestone or shrine. These projects would be a visible daily reminder of her existence, but they would also be an enduring rebuke to those who had betrayed her, proof of their failure to destroy Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her children.

My sisters did not share my interest in the village or my attachment to
Greece. Like my uncle and aunt, they held the villagers responsible for my mother’s fate and they turned their backs on the land where they had suffered so much. They embraced all the luxuries, conveniences and opportunities of America, and obedient to my mother’s warnings, insisted they had no nostalgia for the old country.

The question of avenging our mother’s death also divided my sisters and myself. They were certain that in time, God would punish the guilty. “Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small” is an article of faith rooted in the earliest Hellenistic thought. “Wicked men who congratulate themselves on escaping immediate trouble receive a longer and not a slower punishment,” Plutarch affirmed in his essay on “the tardiness of God’s punishments.”

From childhood I could not share my sisters’ complacent belief that revenge was best left to God, although I understood why they embraced it. They had spent more years than I had in the cauldron of wartime Greece where tragedy rained on every head, and what they had seen had made them fatalists.

In the decade of war from 1939 to 1949, one out of every ten Greeks was killed—450,000 during World War II and 150,000 during the civil war. Of the survivors, nearly 100,000 had been exiled behind the Iron Curtain, some by choice, many by force. Families were rent apart, not to be reunited for many years, often forever. The children taken in the
pedomasoma
from the Mourgana villages were sent to Rumania, while their parents found themselves in Hungary or Poland; the girls conscripted as
andartinas
wound up in Russia or Czechoslovakia. No wonder simple village women like my sisters considered themselves helpless pawns of destiny.

Greek women through the centuries have had little choice but to accept tragedy with resignation and try to survive. Only men were expected to grapple with the Fates, no matter how unequal the contest. It was also a man’s responsibility to seek revenge for the sufferings of weaker members of his family.

Although I was only a nine-year-old boy when I arrived in the United States, I knew even then that the day would come when I had to take some sort of vengeance against my mother’s killers. It was the only balm for what Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, speaking of the long-ago murder of her daughter, called “that pain which never sleeps.”

During my years of growing up in America, my sisters bolstered their argument that God would punish the guilty by citing the fate of those who had contributed to our mother’s death. As news filtered back to us from Greece, it seemed at first that divine retribution was working with merciless efficiency.

Prokopi and Spiro Skevis, the two brothers who sowed the seeds of Communism in Lia, both died before the war was over. Prokopi, the intellectual
one, famed as an orator, was killed by a stray bullet in the mouth during his first battle after he came out of Yugoslavia in the summer of 1949. His brother, the fiery major who led a battalion in the Mourgana, was promoted to colonel, a reward for the skill with which he led his men on the retreat to the Zagoria mountains. In the last days of the civil war, shortly after he learned of his brother’s death, Spiro stepped on a land mine which had been set by his own men. The shrapnel tore away part of one leg and he bled to death over the next two days.

Spiro Skevis’ success in bringing Communism to the Mourgana villages had turned to ashes in his mouth. The execution in Lia of his five fellow villagers tormented him. A captain in his battalion later told me how, shortly after the retreat from the Mourgana, Spiro went out of control and tried to kill one of the chief aides of Kostas Koliyiannis, drawing a gun on him and screaming that the man was a criminal, a murderer of women. Other guerrillas jumped Spiro before he could pull the trigger. He went to the grave tormented by the perversion of the movement that he and Prokopi had begun with such high intentions. After his death he was promoted by the Communists to brigadier general.

The tentacles of the village grapevine, reaching all the way to Worcester, also brought news that two of the women from Lia who betrayed our mother had suffered tragic setbacks.

The blond village beauty, Stavroula Yakou, feared as a collaborator of the guerrillas, had given evidence against my mother and tyrannized Glykeria after the executions. When Stavroula was taken by force to be an
andartina
, Glykeria had the satisfaction of seeing her reduced to groveling hysteria by shell shock in the last months of the war. Stavroula’s sufferings multiplied after she returned from exile in Tashkent to Lia in the late 1950s. A wasting cancer eroded her beauty and killed her slowly.

Her words on her deathbed seemed proof of Plutarch’s contention that “there is no need for either God or man to punish evildoers but that their lives are sufficient, all distraught and ruined as they are by their own villainy.” During her last hours, Stavroula’s mind was obsessed with Eleni Gatzoyiannis. From her deathbed she said to Olga Venetis, our neighbor who had been one of my mother’s closest friends, “Tell the Gatzoyiannis girls that I wasn’t the reason their mother died. What I said was nothing compared to what others said against her. How could I speak against her? We survived on the bread she gave us.” The worm of guilt had been gnawing at Stavroula all those years.

On the last day of my mother’s life, she had referred wistfully to Constantina Drouboyiannis. “She’s lucky,” my mother said to Glykeria. “She managed to save her daughters and herself.” What she didn’t say, but everyone knew, was that by testifying against her, Constantina had destroyed my mother’s defense that she didn’t know about the escape plan. Constantina Drouboyiannis succeeded in having herself exonerated but ultimately she was not the lucky woman my mother had supposed.

After Constantina returned from exile in Hungary and rejoined her husband and children in Crete, she saw her son die, another victim of cancer. A woman who was related to both Constantina’s family and our own later told us that after the boy’s death, one of Constantina’s daughters turned on her mother and exclaimed, “You’ve always said that you were blameless in Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ fate. Now you see the harvest of what you did!” Like most Greeks, the girl shared Euripides’ conviction that “The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.”

Through the decades after the war, I followed the fate of the Greek Communist leaders with dogged interest. From books and articles, some written by the guerrillas themselves, I learned that the leading Communist officers of the war years also seemed pursued by an avenging Nemesis.

After the last mountain stronghold of the DAG fell in August of 1949, Communist Party leader Nikos Zachariadis led his men into exile behind the Iron Curtain and announced on October 16 that he was ending hostilities “to prevent the total destruction of Greece.”

Zachariadis at first managed to retain control of the party despite his disastrous leadership of the insurrection. With the efficiency of a Stalin, he quickly eliminated those who tried to topple him and even caged one of his most vocal critics, a former physician and guerrilla general, in a specially built cell in the basement of Zachariadis’ own dwelling until the prisoner died.

But Zachariadis was a staunch Stalinist, and following the denunciation of the Soviet dictator by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, the party leadership was wrested from him. Battles broke out between supporters and opponents of Zachariadis in Greek exile communities throughout Eastern Europe. In Tashkent, a skirmish among the Greek Communist exiles involving clubs and knives was so vicious that Russian police had to be called in to break it up, and more than a hundred Greeks were hospitalized. In the end, Zachariadis was toppled. He ended his days in 1973 as a clerk in the Department of Waters and Forests for a village lost in the Urals.

While Zachariadis’ ignominious end gave me gratification, as I began probing the fate of other Communist leaders after the war, I learned that two of the men most responsible for my mother’s death had not suffered for their crimes. Kostas Koliyiannis, the individual who held the single greatest responsibility for the executions in the Mourgana villages, had floated to the top of the party leadership after Zachariadis’ downfall, winning his crown as leader of all Greek Communists. The glowering, bearlike political commissar of the Epiros Command had played his cards well.

Koliyiannis proved to be every bit as dictatorial as Zachariadis had been. In 1968 there was a revolt as dissidents seized the party’s radio station and denounced Koliyiannis’ methods. His winning streak finally came to an end and Moscow removed him from power. Spurned by the party he had devoted his life to, Koliyiannis died in Hungary a bitter old man in 1979.
He returned in a casket to the country from which he had been exiled for thirty years.

When I learned of Koliyiannis’ death, I had been living in Greece for two years. I could take some satisfaction from his fate, but it angered me that after all his crimes, Koliyiannis had risen to the top of his world and been allowed to die in bed. When I came to Greece in 1977 as foreign correspondent for the
New York Times
, I intended to track down my mother’s killers, but political upheavals throughout the Middle East kept me out of the country almost continuously. The news that death had cheated me of confronting Koliyiannis convinced me that if I was ever going to find her killers I had to do it at once.

The final catalyst that made me leave my job to devote myself completely to the search was my discovery that the other primary actor in my mother’s fate, Koliyiannis’ agent Katis, was still alive and living comfortably in Greece. Katis was the man who had assembled the case against my mother, prosecuted her and ordered her torture. If Koliyiannis was my Himmler, Katis was his Eichmann, and I couldn’t postpone my need to confront him any longer.

It was at this point that I obtained an unmarked, unregistered hand gun, a Walther PPK, which I brought to Greece in a shipment of personal belongings, concealed inside the canister of an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. I had no clear idea what I intended to do with the gun, but I didn’t want to face Katis without it.

The move to Greece in 1977 had been a rude awakening for me, shattering any belief I might have had in my sisters’ view of divine retribution. From overseas I had found solace in the Communist Party leaders’ fate—outlawed, imprisoned and torn by internecine battles. But I arrived in Athens to be confronted with a resurgence of Communist power in the country.

Immediately after the end of hostilities in 1949, the Communists who had not fled behind the Iron Curtain were persecuted and imprisoned with all the rancor that had taken root during the war years. But slowly the pressures on them relaxed. In 1954 the first exiles were allowed to return from Hungary: carefully screened Greeks who could prove that they were taken by force and harbored no sympathy for the party. Among them came many of the villagers abducted from Lia. After that, refugees began to return in increasing numbers, and the screening process that allowed them back in the country was made more liberal.

After the Communist Party was legalized in Greece in 1974 and the thirty-year statute of limitations on all crimes committed during the war years passed, the Greek Communists in exile came flooding back and began to propagate their own version of the war, making the Communist guerrilla leaders into popular heros. When I moved to Greece, I was confronted daily with the party’s success in winning the loyalties of Greeks who had been born since the war.

Fresh-faced college students knocked at my door every weekend, handing
me propaganda leaflets and inviting me to the ubiquitous Communist youth festivals. If they were asked about the
pedomasoma
, civilian executions and guerrilla brutalities, they smiled and shook their heads at my ignorance: those things had never happened, they explained patiently.