Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  As the machine set to work again, I walked over to the house, looking down for the first time into the exposed cellar where my mother and so many others had spent their last hours.

  The mulberry tree and all the pleasant memories clinging to its branches made me understand that my search would give me as much joy as sorrow. This was the house where Eleni Gatzoyiannis suffered and died, but it was also the house where she was brought as a nineteen-year-old bride, where my sisters and I were born, where we played and fought. The terrace was still there, where my mother would bring her hand-turned sewing machine outside on warm evenings to take advantage of the breeze and look up occasionally from her work to gaze at the valley stretching away below her. We were hungry there but we were happy, too, and our memories would outlast the house. “We have eaten bread and salt together,” the Greeks say, meaning that we have shared the most elemental foods, suffered the same hardships, known the same joys, and that nothing can ever break that bond that ties us together, not even death.

  I would have to rebuild this house, stone by stone, in my imagination, before I could face Katis and the others. I would have to re-create her lost village—a mysterious world as faded now as a tapestry from the Middle Ages, with only a face visible here, an arm there. When I had re-made it, weaving it from the memories of scores of different witnesses, then I would have reached the end of my search for my mother. I would understand what it was that she wanted me to know as she left our gate for the last time to climb to the ravine.

  The witnesses to my mother’s fate were a generation of leaves scattered by winds of war all over the world—Canada, the United States, England, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and every corner of Greece. I had to track them down and use all my professional skill to get the truth from them.

  In the course of the journey I would find not only my mother but myself. By re-creating the last decade of her life, I would learn how much I had been formed by that now-dead world. Whatever I decided I must do to my mother’s killers, was I capable of it? Others in my place were unable to find the will to claim vengeance. Did I have that will?

  When I had uncovered the answer, which lay buried somewhere in the ruins of my house and my childhood, then I would be ready to confront Katis and the rest. But my search had to begin with the discovery of a dead woman and the child who walked out of this mountain over three decades ago. I had to find the story not only of my mother’s death, but of her life as well. And to do that I had to go back to the autumn of 1940.

  In the mountain villages of northern Greece, life moves to the slow rhythm of the seasons, punctuated now and then by the feast days of the saints. October culminates in the feast of St. Demetrios, which marks the end of summer, when the fattened goats and sheep are brought down from the mountain pastures and shut up in the basements under the stone houses for the winter.

  But sometimes the saint comes clothed in a brief reprise of fine weather, the “little summer of St. Demetrios”: a last blaze of gold before winter locks the villagers into their huts. October of 1940 brought such a respite to the hamlets of the Mourgana mountain range, along the northwestern border of Greece, and the villagers took advantage of it to store the autumn harvest: children gathered walnuts, men sorted over the amber and amethyst grapes for the wine making, women strung garlands of dried beans, peppers, onions and garlic to hang from the rafters. The sunshine splashed the mountainside with butter-yellow autumn crocuses, gilded beech trees rustled with ghosts, and everywhere, pomegranates, squashes and pumpkins glowed like miniature suns.

  In Athens the social season was in full swing and the Italian ambassador there, Count Emilio Grazzi, was planning an elegant midnight reception at the legation after a special performance of Madame Butterfly to honor the visiting son of Giacomo Puccini. The Greek royal family and the prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, were expected to attend the opera.

  In Rome, Benito Mussolini was sulking. The dictator complained to his son-in-law, who was also his foreign minister, that Hitler was humiliating him by the conquests he was making in Europe without even consulting him. It was not until three days after the seizure of Rumania that Hitler got around to writing his ally about it. “Hitler keeps confronting me with faits accomplis,” Mussolini ranted to his son-in-law. “This time I shall pay him back in his own coin; he shall learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece!”

  As the social elite of Athens moved among tables decorated with intertwined Greek and Italian flags and banners reading “Long Live Greece,” a coded telegram from Rome began to arrive at the legation. The Italian staff members deciphering it stopped now and then, their faces pale, to mingle with the Greek guests so that nothing would seem amiss. The message was an ultimatum which the horrified Grazzi was to deliver to Metaxas, demanding that Italian troops be allowed to occupy his country.

  At three o’clock on the morning of October 28 Grazzi woke up Metaxas, who received him in dressing gown and slippers, and handed him the ultimatum. Mussolini had given the Greek prime minister three hours to reply. The two men spoke in French. Metaxas’ hands trembled as he looked up from the paper and rejected the ultimatum with the words “Alors, c’est la guerre!”

  Popular legend has condensed Metaxas’ refusal into the single word “Ochi!” (“No!”), which has become a Greek battle cry that blooms defiantly every October 28 on walls throughout Greece. It is permanently emblazoned in ten-foot-high letters of white stone on a peak of the Mourgana range above a small village called Lia in the northwestern corner of Greece, just below the Albanian border.

  But Mussolini didn’t wait for Metaxas’ reply. Before the ultimatum had expired, five heavily armed divisions of Italian soldiers began moving from Albania over the border into Greece.

  IT WAS DURING the little summer of St. Demetrios in 1940 that Eleni Gatzoyiannis attended the disinterment of the bones of her mother-in-law, Fotini Gatzoyiannis, in the village of Lia.

  Eleni had lived with Fotini for almost ten years, from the day she was brought to the woman’s home as a nineteen-year-old bride by Fotini’s fifth son, Christos. She had held her mother-in-law’s hand when she died, worn out by eighty-four years of life and the birth of nine children. Five years had passed since Fotini’s death and it would not be easy to watch the bones taken from the earth, washed and stored in the church ossuary, but in Greece, even in a mountain village of 787 people, grave plots were few and could be occupied only temporarily.

  When Eleni led her children to the burial ground behind the Church of St. Demetrios, in the shade of the giant cypress trees, the professional mourners were already there, clucking sociably like a flock of crows. Soon they would be ripping the bosoms of their dresses, throwing dirt on their heads and weaving the story-songs of Fotini’s life into dirges that could raise the hair on a heathen’s scalp.

  Father Zisis, in his black robes and flat-topped hat, joined the mourners, making the sign of the cross. Eleni picked up a shovel, for it was the duty of the closest relatives to dig up the corpse. Her brother-in-law Foto Gatzoyiannis did the same. He was the only one of Fotini’s children who was not dead or too far away to return.

  Eleni handed the baby boy, Nikola, to her eldest daughter, Olga, twelve, who balanced him on one hip, clearly bored with the ceremony. Alexandra, eight, called by the village nickname “Kanta,” had refused to come at all. Kanta was a nervous, superstitious child who hid in the outhouse, hands pressed over her ears, at the first death knell of the church bells. The sight of a corpse would leave her screaming in her sleep for weeks.

  Fat, flaxen-haired Glykeria, six, was the opposite, pushing to the front, eager for the first glimpse of her grandmother’s skeleton. Whether it was a wedding, a funeral, a traveling shadow-puppet show or the mating of the family ram to a neighbor’s ewe, Glykeria, with her impish eyes and angel hair, was always in the front row. In her excitement, Glykeria had forgotten to look after her little sister, Fotini, two, who now sat deserted on a grave nearby where she was screwing up her face
for a wail of misery.

  The survivors began to dig and the mourners lifted their keening voices, inspiring one another to ever greater displays of poetry and grief:

  Where are you, Kyria Fotini,

  where did the worms lead you?

  Leaving your sons and their brides

  to weep black tears of sorrow.

  The silver has lost its shine,

  the flute has forgotten its melody.

  Eleni took her turn at the shovel and soon the black shroud wrapped around Fotini’s body became visible. They cleared away the last of the dirt with their hands.

  The mourners held their breath. Sometimes the corpse would not be fully decomposed, which meant that the soul was not at peace, but rather a wandering vampire, a vrykolakas. This would require an exorcism by the priest while the remains were carried three times around the church and then reburied for another few years.

  But all was well with Fotini. There was a pungent, mossy odor of decay as the black shroud was lifted off. As so often happened, the collapsed features lay exposed, complete as in life, for one last instant before they crumbled into dust. The priest’s voice rose in the trisagion—the thrice-holy hymn: “Holy God, Holy Almighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” The skeleton lay face up, its arms crossed over the icon, the gold cross lying on the breastbone, the coins to pay the journey to Hades long ago fallen into the eye sockets. Then the women lifted the bones into a copper ewer, where they were washed and sprinkled with red wine, in preparation for reinterment in the small wooden box less than two feet square with crude lettering on the side: “Fotini Nik. Gatzoyiannis, 1851–1935.”

  After the bones were washed clean of dirt and bits of clinging flesh, then piled into the box, the skull was turned upside down like a chalice and red wine poured into the cranium. This cup was passed from hand to hand so that whoever wished could drink from it to erase any curse that Fotini might have spoken against him in life.

  Foto, fiercely mustached and bold as always, held his mother’s skull for a moment, then drank deeply. He had been her sorrow, jailed for murder, a poor provider for his ten children, a notorious adventurer and braggart, and he had good reason to drink, for fear that she might have died with some uncanceled curse against him. Alexo, Foto’s tall, open-faced second wife, dutifully took a swallow after him. The skull passed farther around the circle, and the wails of the mourners rose in pitch.

  Eleni scarcely heard them. She was thinking of the round, smile-creased face of her mother-in-law, an illiterate, wide-hipped village woman who never complained despite the gall life had served her: four of her nine children dead before adulthood, plundering and burnings by the Turks, nagging hunger and deaths that came swiftly as a summer storm. The evil eye had carried away her beautiful daughter Vasiliki when she was sixteen. Her fourth son, Constantine, was a deaf-mute. Her tinker husband Nikola was felled by an attack of pneumonia and left her a widow, pregnant with a little girl who died before they could baptize her.

  But Fotini had managed to rear five sons who helped support the family after her husband’s death. Her favorite, Christos, walked out of the village at seventeen, wearing the fez of the Turkish occupiers, to find the golden land of America. He returned fourteen years later, a bald, prosperous foreigner in a straw hat and pin-striped suit, so changed that Fotini didn’t recognize him until she bent down his head and found the scar from the time he fell out of the walnut tree.

  The arrival of such a bachelor—thirty-one years old, magnificently dressed, the owner of a flourishing business in America—set the local matchmakers atwitter. Christos’ family pressed him to choose a wife from among the village girls before he returned to the other side. The one most often recommended by his relatives was Eleni Haidis, seventeen, the second daughter of Lia’s most prosperous miller. She was described as being of irreproachable character, with the cleverness of her wily father but the gentle nature of her mother. And she was so beautiful, Christos’ elder brother Foto told him, that as she walked down to her father’s mill, the villagers, looking at her, whispered, “God give me two more eyes!”

  Christos took the path to church that passed by the miller’s property, and there he saw Eleni working in the garden. He recalls how the sun seemed to shine from her golden brown hair and poppy-red cheeks, but he insists that it was the modesty of her demeanor and her downcast eyes that attracted him.

  Kitso Haidis was not one to confide in his daughter, but when Foto Gatzoyiannis came to call, the girl suspected what was in the air. She had seen Christos Gatzoyiannis going to church in his fine foreign clothes. He was not handsome and he was fourteen years older than she, but unlike her tyrannical father, whose house she could leave only as a bride, this man with the soft white hands and fine manners was rumored to be kind and generous.

  Naturally, her father did not consult her on what qualities she would like to see in a husband, nor did Eleni exchange a single word with Christos, but she was not unhappy when he arrived at the house one evening and her father directed her to bring the customary coffee. She didn’t even look at the stranger’s face as he took the cup and in its place on the tray put an American $20 bill, saying, “This is for you.” She knew her future had been decided.

  After the engagement was sealed with food, wine and a fusillade of bullets fired at the heavens to notify the neighbors, Eleni was allowed to converse with her fiancé on the occasions when she walked with her parents to church. Christos strutted at her side in his straw boater, his starched white shirtfront radiant in the sun, and told her that when he returned to Lia in a year or so, he would pay for the finest wedding the village had ever seen. He would bring cloth from America and hire the best dressmaker in the region to make the wedding costumes. Eleni spoke little; she didn’t know what to say to such a sophisticated man, but she loved listening to his stories of the wonders of the world beyond the mountains. He seemed so different from the rough, sun-blackened village youths. After Christos left the village, as she put the finishing touches on her dowry, Eleni reflected that she had been incredibly fortunate in her father’s choice of a husband.

  True to his word, Christos returned in November of 1926, and on the last permissible day before the Christmas Lent, their wedding crowns were exchanged in the Church of St. Demetrios.

  In a tearful conversation before the wedding Eleni told Christos that she would not be able to go to America with him. Her mother, whom she had always tried to protect from her father’s temper, insisted she would commit suicide on the day Eleni left the village. Christos was disappointed, but he was not angry or surprised. He knew that ties of blood superseded all others in village society. A woman was judged by her sense of duty to her aged parents almost as much as her dedication to her children. Eleni’s parents had no male heirs, and her elder sister, Nitsa, had not only married into a poor family but seemed unable to provide any grandchildren. After Eleni’s brilliant marriage, her parents’ welfare would be her responsibility.

  Christos decided to spend at least a year in the village, setting up his bride in his mother’s household before returning to America. It was hardly unusual in the mountain villages for a husband and wife to spend much of their lives apart. The majority of men in Lia were itinerant tinkers and coopers who traveled far from their homes for most of the year, leaving their wives to farm the fields, rear the children, care for their parents and look after things until their husbands returned for a well-deserved period of idleness, which they spent exchanging stories in the cafenions, the village coffeehouses. The Greek emigrants who settled in foreign lands and supported their families by regularly mailed checks had only extended the traditional periods of absence. Christos was glad that Eleni would be there to look after his mother as well as her own parents.

  He installed his bride in Fotini’s two-room house and brought workmen from Konitsa, a day’s walk to the northeast, to add on two more rooms, making it the largest dwelling in Lia. Before Christos left for America in 1928, Eleni gave birth to a girl.
Two extended visits home over the next ten years produced four more children.

  Now, with her mother-in-law dead, Eleni lived alone with the children, dependent on the checks her husband sent every month. She knew if that life line was cut and her husband disappeared into the golden land, forgetting his Greek family, as sometimes happened, their four young daughters would become beggars, with no chance of dowries, and her son, Nikola, would never see his father’s face.

  At the thought of Nikola, Eleni’s eyes filled. She and Fotini had prayed so often for a boy. They lit daily candles, hid garlic under the pillow during Christos’ visits from America, bought malewort from the witches and brewed it into bitter tea. But each visit produced another girl. Though villagers began to mock Eleni, her mother-in-law never reproached her. She took each tiny girl in her hands and crooned songs of wedding veils, dowry chests and golden rings. The villagers whispered that Eleni could make only girls, but Fotini comforted her that it was God’s compensation for her own three girls who had died. These granddaughters, Olga, Kanta and Glykeria, would be her solace, Fotini said. She sat up with Eleni through their bouts of croup and whooping cough, rubbing their gums with home-distilled tsipouro when they fussed with teething pains.

  The old woman and the young bride had been bound together by their shared struggles, and Eleni grieved that Fotini hadn’t lived to see the fourth girl, who bore her name, or the boy, who had finally answered their prayers.

  The skull was passed to Eleni with the dregs of wine inside. Tonight it would rest at the left of the altar of St. Demetrios, and tomorrow it would be placed in the ossuary below the church, where more than two centuries of villagers’ bones lined the walls.