Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  Eleni passed the Church of St. Demetrios every day and usually stopped to light a candle. Many times she had seen the basement cavern, where the wall of bones, the old ones stacked like kindling, glowed with a pale-yellow phosphorescence in the darkness. They did not frighten her; it was the natural epilogue. She felt comfortable surrounded by the hundreds of skulls, empty now of all love, sorrow, foolishness or wisdom, anonymously awaiting Judgment Day.

  Eleni held the skull in her hands for a moment, feeling the firmness, the lightness of it, and decided not to drink. She had no fear that Fotini had left a curse against her. The woman had bequeathed her nothing but blessings; most of all the example of her own life.

  Three days after the ceremony, the spurious summer of St. Demetrios was gone and a gray rain drummed on the slate roof of Eleni’s house in the highest part of Lia, Perivoli—the orchard.

  The Perivoli was near the top of a triangle of green vegetation that spilled down the cleft between two naked granite peaks of the Mourgana mountain range, bisected by a deep ravine. Lia’s 150 crude stone huts clung precariously to each side of the ravine. The neighborhood of the Perivoli covered the western bank, and the houses to the east, surrounding the village square with its giant plane tree, Holy Trinity Church and the schoolhouse, made up the middle village. As the land sloped more gently toward the foothills, scattered houses flanked the ancient Church of the Virgin to form the lower village. Below, the fertile triangle of holm oak, scrub pine and underbrush spread down into soft ripples of foothills, then rose ten miles in the distance to splash up against the other rim of the bowl of mountains that circumscribed the villagers’ universe; vast and complete, jagged mountain peaks piercing whipped-cream castles of cumulus clouds to the south, mists smoking up from the valley floor far below.

  It was an isolated and magnificent world that every villager saw from his window; a constant reminder of the overwhelming power of nature and the insignificance of man. To his back, high above him, loomed the Mourgana range, its summit forming the border with Albania and closing the northern edge of his horizon. Lia stood at the center of the range, huddled below two heights like sentinels: the Prophet Elias, named for the tiny stone chapel on its tip, and a truncated peak called Kastro because it bore a crumbling acropolis, the fortress of the Hellenistic community that lived there three hundred years before Christ. To the east and west, tucked into folds of the mountain and out of sight of Lia, were ten more villages strung along the timberline, without even a road to connect them to the rest of the world. To the south, across the bowl of foothills, rose the gray bulks of mountains in the distance, like sounding whales: the double peak of Velouna on the east, named for its resemblance to an archer’s bow, flowed into the dark spine of the Great Ridge, which terminated in the smooth, scrub-covered hump of Plokista and the arched back of Taverra. Closing the rim to the west were smaller mountains, where the sun disappeared into the distant depths of Albania.

  The landscape in which the villagers of Lia spun out their lives like spiders clinging to a wall affected them in ways that could never be understood by those who walk on flat land. Mankind seemed an afterthought of the gods who created such mountains. The relentless cycles of the seasons, rain and snow, sunlight and darkness, ruled the daily lives of the peasants who worked with one goal: to wrest food out of the stony mountain slopes, digging terraced steps on which to plant their crops.

  Cut off from the rest of the world and driven together by the need to survive, the peasants of the Mourgana villages had no privacy. Every house looked into the one below. Voices traveled for miles through the thin air, and wherever they walked on the mountain paths, they felt eyes watching them from above or below or from a neighboring cliff. Despite the vastness of their universe under the sky, the villagers knew that everything they did was observed and overheard.

  These mountains have always bred stern, ascetic people, cut off from the wealth of the seas and the temperate climate of the flatlands, so isolated that for centuries no strangers had diluted their Dorian blood or adulterated their fair complexion and classical features. The isolation and cruelty of the landscape, especially in winter, made the peasants short-tempered and sometimes drove them mad, but those who managed to escape from these mountains would never find any other place as beautiful.

  On October 28, 1940, the relentless rain had driven most of the inhabitants of Lia indoors. In the Gatzoyiannis kitchen, close to the fire, eight-year-old Kanta combed Glykeria’s maize-yellow hair for lice and plaited it into two long braids. Olga was bent over a shift she was embroidering for her dowry and two-year-old Fotini was being coaxed out of a fit of whining with a doll that Eleni was weaving from the leaves of the Judas tree. Nikola was asleep in his carved wooden cradle.

  Over the sound of the rain tumbled a great roll of thunder that stopped Glykeria’s complaining in mid-sentence and made everyone look up. Eleni stepped out on the flagstone veranda, which commanded a view straight down the mountain. To the south, in the direction of Povla, four miles away, she saw red flashes of light on the horizon.

  Suddenly there was a shriek from the house of Lambrini Fafouti below. Her daughter had just married, only to have the groom drafted into the army amid rumors of war with Italy. Now Lambrini ran through the rain, her black shawl flapping, her kerchief askew, screeching, “My brave little Tsavo! Those are his cannons! He’s shooting at the Italians! It’s war!”

  Eleni turned at the threshold and looked at her silent children. “She’s right!” she told them. “It’s not thunder; it’s artillery! The war has begun!”

  Eleni had never seen war, but from earliest childhood she had been told of the glorious deeds of the War of Independence against the Turks in 1821: white-skirted palikaria with sweeping mustaches embracing danger with defiant songs and flashing eyes under the banner of “Freedom or Death.” Only fifty miles to the south, the women of Souli had hurled their children over the cliff at Zalongo and then, hands clasped as at a wedding feast, danced off the precipice, choosing death on the rocks below rather than dishonor at the hands of the Turks. Now war had come to Eleni’s doorstep, heralded by the screeching of Lambrini Fafouti.

  Kanta wasn’t sure what “artillery” meant, but the way her mother said it made her sit down suddenly, dropping the braid she was plaiting. Glykeria hopped with excitement. Eleni saw fear on the face of her eldest daughter, Olga, and understood what she was thinking. It may have been over a hundred years since the Souliote women died, but in a Greek village in 1940, it was still incumbent on a woman to choose death before dishonor.

  The grumbling of the guns rose, and Eleni turned to look at the photograph of Christos, in its ornate brass frame on the mantelpiece, wondering what he would tell her to do: stay and protect the house or take the children and flee. But he only gazed back from behind his gold-rimmed glasses with a complacent smile, his bow tie rakish beneath his double chin; the image of a man of substance who lived in a sane and logical world. There was no way he could advise her. Though Eleni couldn’t know how accurate her premonition was, she sensed that this war had just cut her last link to her husband.

  Eleni was trying to calm the girls when her sister, Nitsa, puffed through the gate like a squat black tugboat, her pair of goats and her thin, worried-looking husband struggling in her wake.

  The hand-turned bell on the gate jangled again and Eleni opened it to find her gaunt, hawk-faced mother, who was called Megali (“the Old One”) as a sign of respect, her black kerchief covered by a hooded oil cloth. Behind her was Eleni’s father, the white-haired miller Kitso Haidis, holding their sleeping rugs.

  Everyone shouted and argued about what to do, stopping now and then to listen to the sounds of the distant battle. Finally the ten of them arranged themselves to sleep on the floor around the kitchen fireplace, Nitsa and Megali closest to the warmth, as the guns coughed fitfully through the night.

  Three days of indecision ended when a shepherd boy arrived at Eleni’s house with the news that the Italians
were advancing. The villagers were going to have to flee.

  As Megali and Nitsa loaded the donkey with bread and cheese, Eleni walked through the four rooms of her house, touching the luxuries that Christos had brought her over the years, the wonders of the village. The Singer sewing machine and the gramophone with its trumpet speaker were too big to hide. They’d be the first things the Italians would take. But smaller objects could be concealed in the hollow oak tree out back. She gathered the golden pitcher from Constantinople, etched with minarets and gardens, and the iridescent Turkish pillow. From her wooden dowry chest Eleni took the silver jewelry; the huge belt buckle and breast ornaments. Last of all she picked up Christos’ brass-framed photograph and the sandalwood box that held his letters.

  Outside her gate the narrow mountain path toward the caves above was already a flood of jostling, shouting families with their goats and lambs and the donkeys carrying great pots of food and the rainbow-colored tufted sleeping rugs called velenzes. The brown-limbed children laughed, enjoying the outing, while the adults cursed the others’ slowness and pleaded with donkeys and grandparents to hurry up. Gunfire reverberated through the mountainside.

  Nitsa’s husband Andreas took two-year-old Fotini on his back like a monkey. Nitsa lashed the baby Nikola into his round-bottomed wooden cradle and tied it onto Eleni’s back, throwing a rope across her throat, around the cradle and then fastening the rope to the first loop on her chest.

  Eleni didn’t look back at her house as she plunged into the exodus leading up the mountain. At the spring above the house, where she went daily to fill the water barrels, another stream of refugees, coming from the village center, joined the torrent. It was hard not to get elbowed off the path and over the cliff as they pushed up past the mill of Tassi Mitros.

  The tide of humanity surged toward the series of small caves hidden in the rock above the Perivoli, near the top of the ravine: the women moving like giant black land snails, their backs bent under cradles, bundles of pots and sleeping rugs. The mountain dwellers had taken refuge from invaders in these caves since the dawn of time: Dorians, Illyrians, Romans, Goths, Franks, Bulgars, Slavs, Turks, all had swept over the Mourgana spine, looting and killing. With an atavistic sense of self-preservation, the children of those who had survived now returned to the same spot.

  Weary from the weight of the cradle, Eleni led her brood into one of the overcrowded caves, full of the smell of bodies; people wedged too close together to lie down, their backs against the sweating stone walls. The daylight slowly faded and the cavern became claustrophobic with the breath of the fugitives.

  Eleni looked at the dim faces of the women around her, incongruous away from their neat stone houses, well-swept dirt floors and whitewashed walls, frightened at being plucked from their carefully regulated existence and driven here like leaves in a storm.

  From the moment a female was born in the village, her life was prescribed and ordered by centuries of custom, so deeply etched that no one stopped to question, for a woman was as innocent of self-determination as a member of a beehive. If she survived the first forty days of her life, a girl child was taken to the church to be blessed. But she was carried by the priest no farther than the narthex, while an infant boy was shown to God before the Holy Gates leading to the altar.

  “May you have male children and female goats” the villagers always toasted one another, raising glasses of tsipouro. A female child was a liability, burdening her parents with the need to guard her virtue and accumulate a dowry until she was taken as a bride to live out her life working for her husband’s family.

  A girl had to put on the kerchief at age eleven so that no wayward curl could invite the lust of a stranger, nor could she utter even a “Good morning” to a male outside the family. Only twice a year was an unmarried girl seen in public, sitting among the women at the Christmas and Easter liturgies. The rest of the time, walls of stone and the vigilance of father and brother surrounded her as she learned a woman’s duties: tending the animals and the fields, cutting firewood, cooking and cleaning, sewing, spinning and embroidering for her dowry. Virtue and beauty counted little if the dowry was too small. If a match was successfully concluded by the go-betweens, after many secret midnight meetings, the bride was carried off to the household of a man she had never spoken to, whose face she might never have seen, to spend the wedding night sleeping not beside the groom, but with his mother, to symbolize her subjugation. Her sexual initiation would be terrifying, sometimes accomplished by force under the gaze of the animals in the basement stable—with four generations in a two-room house, there was little chance for privacy.

  Some unfortunate brides were sent home before the wedding guests had left when proof of their virginity had not been convincing. And for a tainted village girl there was no alternative but life as a spinster, going from door to door doing chores in exchange for food.

  A woman named Vasilo from the neighboring village of Babouri had been seduced by her mother’s brother while the family slept, all crowded together on their pallets under shared sleeping rugs. Only fourteen, as ignorant of sex as any village girl, she didn’t realize what had happened until her belly started to swell under the shapeless black homespun. The baby was born by the side of the road and left there as the mother, bleeding and hysterical, ran screaming into the woods where she was finally found. The uncle was never seen again. The villagers composed a humorous song about her, suggesting that she throw herself off a cliff, but she was now huddled in the cave, her face still a child’s, one of the shadow women who had broken the village code.

  Even an unblemished bride might find herself deserted. There were many temptations for the tinkers and coopers, who traveled for six months at a time. The traditional journeys were becoming more extended, some men going to Egypt and South Africa; some, like Christos, as far as America, returning now and then to father a child. Some never came back. Anastasia Yakou, Eleni’s neighbor in the Perivoli, had lost her husband to the flesh-pots of Kalambaka when her two girls were babies. Eleni often hired Anastasia to help with housekeeping and planting chores, and the sight of the ragged Yakou girls was a constant reminder of what would happen if Christos forgot them.

  But no matter how far the men went and for how long, it was the responsibility of the women, their roots deep in the earth, to protect the family name and the village traditions. Anastasia Lollis had married in 1911 and lived with her husband only a year before he sailed off to America, where, returnees said, he had acquired a wife and family in Chicago. But Anastasia still waited for his return and would continue to wait for more than seventy years.

  Women went into labor and gave birth alone, or tried to abort themselves with herbs, wooden stakes and heavy rocks if a pregnancy occurred during a husband’s long absence. Even if the seducer was a bride’s father-in-law, the ruler of her household, she would get no mercy. Many women died in labor despite the best efforts of the village midwife. Eudoxia Kolokithi had labored for five days, exhausting eighteen neighborhood women who took turns holding her upright in their embrace while the midwife worked, but in the end they took the baby out of her in pieces as with a calf-bound cow.

  Eleni’s sister-in-law Chryso, first wife of Foto Gatzoyiannis, captured the eye of a Turkish peddler with her beauty in 1909. When Foto heard of the Turk’s offer of a gold sovereign for a night with his wife, he shot the peddler dead. But Foto lost his young wife early, when she died trying to give birth to twins, who were buried in the same shroud as their mother. Unlucky in death as in life, Chryso was found turned when they dug her up, convincing the villagers that she had awakened in the grave. Foto was not one to mourn, though. He had already married Alexo, who would give him nine more children.

  Chryso’s death, Anastasia’s abandonment, Vasilo’s disgrace were all threads in the tapestry of village life, but for Eleni it was her mother-in-law, Fotini, who wove the threads into a pattern so that she could understand the proper behavior for a woman who was taxidimeni—the property o
f an absent husband.

  A village wife was constantly reminded that she was her husband’s property. From her wedding day the villagers addressed her by the feminine form of her husband’s name: “Nikolina” (Nikola’s woman), “Tassina” (Tasso’s woman), “Papadia” (the priest’s woman), so that everyone nearly forgot their real first names. Eleni’s friends sometimes called her “Kitchina” (Christos’ woman), but the village had given her another name, which would follow her to her death: “the Amerikana”—the American’s woman.

  Because she was taxidimeni, Fotini made Eleni understand, she must wear clothes of somber colors and be more formal in her dealings with men than other village women. Eleni was an intelligent pupil, and she understood the perils of flouting the village code. She chose her friends among women much older than herself, dressed her daughters in the most conservative way, watched their behavior with unfailing vigilance and took Olga out of school even before the traditional age of eleven.

  In a world as closed as Lia, tradition was the scaffolding that supported the village. One betrayal of the moral code and the entire structure could come tumbling down on everyone’s head. Thanks to the example of her mother-in-law, Eleni had become one of the most admired women in Lia, despite the dangers posed by an absent husband and her own fine-boned beauty. But since Fotini’s death, the village had begun to tighten around her like a prison. There was no man to advise her or share the burdens, no mother-in-law to protect her from the constant scrutiny of the villagers, eager to find a flaw in the behavior of the prosperous “Amerikana.”

  When the cave had been in darkness for hours, the rain became heavier, and the dampness seeped into the fugitives’ marrow. After midnight Nikola began to cry and Eleni put him to her breast, but he refused to nurse and turned his head away, wailing louder. A dozen voices shushed him and threatened his mother with expulsion from the cave. Eleni dug a box of matches from her apron. She lit one to look at the baby’s face. Instantly he stopped crying, the flame reflected in his chestnut eyes, but when it sputtered out, he began again.