Eleni (90 page)

“I told you—”

“Wait, wait …”

“Don’t tell me anything!” he exclaimed. “You can tell me we tried fifty. I’ll let you, if that’s what you want …”

“Are you going to let me finish?”

“No!” he shouted, still trying to dismiss me. “I won’t let you because you’re saying things that are not supportable! The only persons I tried are the officers and the doctor I told you about.”

“There were five people executed in Lia,” I continued doggedly. I was determined to get it all out no matter how many times he tried to stop me. “Three men and two women. The trial began in the village square and then because of artillery fire from the Great Ridge it was transferred to a ravine at the top of the village covered by trees—”

“I don’t know anything about any Great Ridge or any military trial taken from one place to another,” he exploded.

“I know you’re lying because—”

“You won’t tell me any more because our conversation is over!”

“You’re covering up!” I shouted.

His voice rose in pitch. “Do you hear me? What I have told you is it! I have nothing more to say. It’s past. It’s over!”

“It’s not over for me,” I said.

He had me figured out by now. “I don’t know. For you it may not be over, of course,” he said without concern, “because I don’t know who you are and what you’re harboring or if you had some relative who was a victim.”

His wife’s eyes were going from my face to his, registering astonishment at what was happening in her living room.

“I have,” I nodded. “And you were the cause. I was nine years old and they took my mother and they tried her on August twenty-first in front of the entire village. Everyone was there. And they took her on August twenty-eighth above the village and they shot her—”

“Listen, Nikola,” Katis broke in.

“—and now you pretend you know nothing!” I finished. “Why don’t you tell the truth? Why do you lie even now?”

Katis was trying to calm me. “Why don’t you go to the courts?” he asked. “Why don’t you follow a judicial—”

“You know the law,” I broke in. “You know that the statute of limitations lapses after thirty years, even for murder!”

Katis pulled himself up coldly. “That is your own affair,” he said. “The only trial I presided over was for the officers and the doctor. I told you about that.”

I was beginning to stammer in my anger. “I want to ask you one thing.”

“Yes,” he replied.

“The last day of my mother’s life, August twenty-eighth, they let one of my sisters see her one last time.” I was trying to remind him of the moment my mother had asked him something on behalf of her daughter, but I was having trouble getting it out.

“Yes,” he encouraged.

“Eleni Gatzoyiannis. Her name was Eleni Gatzoyiannis.”

“Eleni Gatzoyiannis,” he repeated, wrinkling his brow. “I never heard of her. If others tried her, I don’t know.”

“You presided,” I said.

“I never tried any woman,” he intoned. “I am being serious now. This is not a matter for—”

His wife broke in, her face twisted with uncertainty. “Maybe you made a mistake,” she said to me.

“There were three hundred people at the trial,” I replied. “Are all of them lying?”

Katis shook his head. “I don’t remember more than fifty people at any trial. I remember once there was a woman in Presba …”

He proceeded to tell me about a trial that took place on Vitsi, where he claimed to have saved a woman from being sentenced to death, but I
wouldn’t let him finish, or even stop to point out that he was contradicting what he had just said about having presided at only one trial. I was determined to get to the last act in my mother’s life, in which he was a participant.

“And on the day my mother died …” I said.

“Don’t blame me for any woman’s death!” Katis shouted. “I’m offended!”

“You’re offended? You killed my mother!”

“I am not involved.” He was speaking now with his former magisterial loftiness.

“You are responsible!”

“If you please! I was not involved in the trial of any woman.”

“I can bring you dozens of witnesses,” I insisted.

“I was involved in the trial of those officers, yes, but Eleni Gatzoyiannis I never tried,” he repeated. “You have to find out who did.”

“I’ve found him,” I shouted. My hand had retreated behind my back to the gun, hard and cold under my palm. “Three hundred people aren’t all lying.”

“You have been given wrong information, my friend,” Katis insisted. “I wasn’t in the Mourgana long. I left there when Mourgana fell, I went to Grammos and Vitsi.”

“That was on September sixteenth,” I said.

“Exactly,” he nodded.

“My mother was tried on August twenty-first and executed on August twenty-eighth.”

Katis laughed harshly, the sound echoing in the silent room. “Impossible!” he exclaimed. “We were preparing the evacuation then.”

“Then you’re telling me my mother wasn’t shot?” I asked, my voice rising. “She’s still alive?” I turned toward his wife, whose face showed that she was beginning to absorb what I was saying with a horrified conviction that it was true. “They took them up to the ravine,
Kyria
,” I said, speaking to her now, trying not to look at his face, contorted and staring in hatred. “And they shot them and threw them into a gully without even burying them.” I turned back to Katis, who kept saying, “Listen! … Listen!”

“And when my grandfather went to find her body …”

At that point my voice failed me completely and I couldn’t say another word. I had my hand on the gun and while I was talking, thoughts were passing through my mind; images really, flashing by like a slide show run at a manic pace. My mother’s body. My son’s face—the same age now that I was when my mother died.

I knew now absolutely that I wanted to kill Katis. But the logical part of my mind was telling me there was only one road out of town. To have any chance of escaping, I would have to kill Katis’ wife as well, who had been listening to me with compassion and belief, and his daughter, too, who was somewhere inside with her child. Or I would kill only him, and the
women would call the police and have me arrested before I was out of Konitsa.

While we were arguing, I had time to wonder what would become of my children. The thought was holding me back. I wanted to goad him until he came at me. The touch of his hand would drive out reason, propelling me into action. I needed to be pushed beyond logic to forget everything but my hatred. If he attacked me, I knew I would be able to shoot him without reflecting on the consequences, and I desperately wanted to see his blood spilling out, staining the rugs at our feet.

The thought of my grandfather uncovering my mother’s body drove me over the edge, and words gave way to action. I stood up and spat on him. There was enough saliva to cover his twitching face and drip down his neat shirt and vest. In Greece, to spit on someone is the worst possible insult, worse than the most terrible verbal abuse, a slap or a blow. Katis leaped to his feet, and for an instant he was the guerrilla judge in the prime of his strength and power. “You spit on me? On me! Do you know who I am?” he bellowed. I waited for his blow to fall, wishing for it, to be answered by the sound of my gun. But his wife jumped up. Perhaps she saw my hand behind me, perhaps not. Her shrill voice shattered the moment of frozen silence as we faced each other.

“Achilleas! Stop! Don’t you move!” she screamed.

Slowly his hands opened, no longer fists, and he slumped back into his chair, his face dripping with my spittle.

The moment was gone. He had collapsed into an old man as his wife stood, waving her hands excitedly. Drawn by the commotion, his daughter appeared at the door. “What’s happened?” she cried. “What’s going on here?”

I turned to her. “My mother was murdered,” I told her, “and your father was responsible.”

She looked at me as if suddenly understanding everything. “Ah, that’s why you came here,” she said.

“That’s why,” I replied and started for the door. I could still hear Katis’ wife exclaiming as I slammed the door with a report like the pistol shot I had been waiting for. The moment had slipped past and I hadn’t done it.

There’s no other sound on the tape but the quick rhythm of my footsteps on the gravel, going on and on.

As I drove back toward Yannina, everything around me in the sunlit landscape seemed changed, warped, as if seen under water. I was sick with frustration. I had looked on the face of Katis and he was still alive. I had acted in the heat of my emotions, but at the critical moment, something stopped me. If only he had come at me, I knew I would have shot him. Now I was cheated of the satisfaction I had been pursuing for so long. The pain that had brought me to his door was stronger than ever.

There was no doubt in my mind that Katis deserved to die. I was convinced he hadn’t changed in the years since he sent my mother to her death. I had seen the arrogance and the killer’s cold indifference in his eyes when he came toward me.

I vowed that I would confront him again, when I could act without emotion and without fear of interference from his family, and I did.

It was four months later, in the port of Igoumenitsa on the Ionian Sea, where I learned Katis and his family had taken an apartment for the summer. I waited outside the building until I saw his wife, daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons leave the apartment and head toward the beach for a swim. I had shaved off my beard, and his wife walked by me without recognition.

Knowing that Katis was alone, I let myself into his apartment by forcing the lock with a plastic card. I opened the door slowly and saw him in front of me, asleep in a chair pulled up to the picture window of the living room. In the merciless sunlight, his gap-toothed mouth hung open, his head resting on one shoulder. The pajama top he was wearing over his trousers was open to reveal the caved-in chest and wrinkled potbelly. His flesh was gray.

He didn’t stir as I examined him from a few yards away. I felt no pity for him, his age and his helplessness, only hatred and revulsion. He looked like a cadaver. I had the gun in the small of my back but I realized I could simply smother him with a pillow and leave. His family would return to discover that Katis had died in his sleep. No one would suspect I had ever been there.

I stood staring at the man who had killed my mother for a few minutes, perhaps more. Then I turned around and walked out, closing the door softly behind me. This time I knew it was truly finished. I had found the perfect opportunity for killing him and I couldn’t do it. At the end of my long journey I learned that I didn’t have the will.

This ending is not the one I had expected when I began to write. There is no satisfaction in it. The pain of my mother’s murder is still as sharp, and the anger that her killer lives increases every day.

I have done nothing since leaving Igoumenitsa but ask myself why I didn’t kill him. I know it was fear that stopped me: partly the fear of being separated from my children and of setting in motion events that would continue the killing and the suffering into future generations. It was also something else: the understanding of my mother that I had gained in my examination of her life.

During my search I had learned some of her last words, clues to her thoughts as she prepared to die. To Glykeria, our mother remarked on the good fortune of Constantina Drouboyiannis in saving both her daughters and her own life, but she said nothing of hatred or revenge. When Angeliki Botsaris was brought to face her on the day before the execution, my mother did not speak of the pain of her torture, but only of her longing to embrace
her children one last time. And her final cry, before the bullets of the firing squad tore into her, was not a curse on her killers but an invocation of what she died for, a declaration of love: “My children!”

Unlike Hecuba, my mother did not spend the last of her strength cursing her tormentors, but, like Antigone, she found the courage to face death because she had done her duty to those she loved. Sophocles’ Antigone tells the man who has condemned her to death, her uncle and king, “It’s not my nature to join in hating, but in loving.”

That was Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ nature as well, and Katis had not been able to destroy it by killing her. Like the mulberry tree in our yard, which still stands after the house has fallen into ruins, that love has taken root in us, her children, and spread to her grandchildren as well.

If I killed Katis, I would have to uproot that love in myself and become like him, purging myself as he did of all humanity or compassion. Just as he had abandoned his baby daughter and wife to become a killer for the guerrillas, I would have to put aside thoughts of what I was doing to my children’s lives. My mother had done everything out of love for her own children.

Killing Katis would give me relief from the pain that had filled me for so many years. But as much as I want that satisfaction, I’ve learned that I can’t do it. My mother’s love, the primary impulse of her life, still binds us together, often surrounding me like a tangible presence. Summoning the hate necessary to kill Katis would sever that bridge connecting us and destroy the part of me that is most like Eleni.