When he married and had children, he decided that the United States was far too treacherous a place to raise a family, especially four daughters. Working long hours, he could not supervise them properly and his wife would be cut off from the support system of relatives and neighbors she had in Lia. In the village, wives and daughters knew exactly how to conduct themselves; the strict ethos permitted no lapses, but America was full of fallen women. Furthermore, his modest income allowed him to make his family the wealthiest in Lia, at the pinnacle of the social ladder, but if we ever came to Massachusetts, we would find ourselves children of a struggling vegetable peddler. Worse, we would see him treated with the scorn that rich Yankees displayed toward the immigrants who served them. Instead, when my father returned to Lia on his periodical sabbaticals, his wife and children considered him a sophisticated and successful American tycoon.
He loved passing long days of luxurious idleness in the cafenions, basking in the adulation of family and friends, but he also had become accustomed to the conveniences of America: fine clothes, weekly baths—and no relatives to answer to. That was the other side of the coin: my father had been seduced by American comforts and the bachelor life he created among other immigrant men in Worcester.
While he never became perfectly American, my father absorbed the country’s optimism and naïveté. Greek peasants at home were the opposite, profoundly suspicious of their neighbors, proud of their wiliness. They have a disparaging term for people like my father: Amerikanaki—“little American”—implying a wide-eyed innocent, eager to be duped. My father had come to America at seventeen and stayed away from the village too long. With time and distance, Greece began to take on a nostalgic aura of security and safety in his mind. He saw danger to his family among the industrial smokestacks and noisy streets of Worcester, but he couldn’t imagine that his wife and children were in greater danger in the simple mountain village where he was born.
As the harvest season passed and the winter rains began, the roll of bills in the rubber band became alarmingly thin. Christos and Nassios knew it was time to give up their pleasant idleness and return to America. One morning in late October, Christos took out his suitcases and began to pack.
Nursing Fotini, Eleni watched him, realizing that she should have spoken before. She had been waiting for the right moment and now he was about to leave them behind again! She tried to prepare her speech, to convince him of the logic of her reasoning, and then, stammering in her eagerness, she blurted it all out. He had to take them back with him. It was too difficult to raise the girls alone! They needed their father. Hadn’t he always said that America was the finest country in the world? “I don’t want them to grow up here! I want them to have something better!” she concluded, her voice sounding shrill in her ears.
Christos looked at her as if he had never seen her before. “What’s the matter with your life?” he demanded. “Don’t you have the best life of any woman in this village?”
Eleni opened and shut her mouth, determined to stand her ground. “I don’t want us to be separated anymore!” she said. “I’m tired of raising the girls alone, not knowing if you’re alive or dead! I’ll get sick again!”
Her words hit home and made him strike out at her in anger because with his produce truck and his money gone, he knew there was no way he could give her what she wanted. “Don’t you know there’s a depression on in America!” he shouted. “People are starving! In America you pay for electricity, food, clothes! Here you live off the land. Haven’t I just bought you another field to farm? You need money in the bank before they let you bring a family into America! And it’s not a fit place for children, especially if the children are girls!”
He might as well have slapped her as reminded her of her failure. The shock of his words suddenly brought Christos clearly into focus for Eleni. For the first time she understood that he enjoyed having his family far away in Greece. He didn’t want to be burdened with the responsibility of their presence. He preferred returning now and then, hands full of gifts, to be admired by everyone.
As if he could see her disenchantment, Christos turned defensive. “I came because you were sick! I’ve spent everything on this trip. Look what’s left!”
He pulled out the much-handled roll of bills, now limp and pitifully small. Eleni stared in astonishment. “If that’s all you have, why were you spending like a pasha, keeping every good-for-nothing in these two villages in food and drink?”
At a loss, he replied, “They expect it of me! I’m an American!”
Eleni did not mention America again. The weight settled back on her shoulders. But she could not forget that she had seen, in a flash of insight, Christos’ vanity and his reluctance to take on responsibility. Like every village girl, she had married a stranger. But like every wife, she had finally seen through to her husband’s core.
As the leaves of the beech trees turned yellow, Christos and Nassios planned their departure. They would meet Mourtos the mule driver at the monastery of St. Athanassios, which lay halfway down the mountain between Lia and Babouri.
After midnight on November 17, 1938, Christos, Eleni and Olga set out for the monastery on foot, climbing quietly over the garden wall so that no one would hear them go. Nitsa had warned Christos that if he was seen, jealous villagers could throw black magic in his path and he would never return.
When Mourtos arrived with the mules, Christos threw an arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear. Eleni overheard the words “Just enough for the ferry to Italy.” She noticed the fleeting look of contempt on the Turk’s face and the exaggerated friendliness in her husband’s manner.
Christos kissed her on both cheeks and said she must have courage; soon he would either send for her or come back to stay. She answered with a hint of defiance, “When we meet again, I want it to be on American soil.”
Christos ignored the remark, and contented himself with giving her some final words of moral advice. The girls’ reputations were her responsibility, he reminded her. The house and all their land were in her hands. He quoted once more his favorite maxim: “Honor is beyond price or measure. A woman has no greater treasure.”
Eleni listened silently to his advice, her fear growing at the thought that she was about to be left alone again with all the responsibility for the children in a world overshadowed by the threat of war. Then he kissed her again and was gone, mounting the lead mule with an agility surprising in a man of his bulk.
She was lonely and irrationally afraid, like a child who senses something terrible lurking in the darkness. She didn’t cry. She only waved at the departing figure of her husband.
As the mule approached the first bend in the road, Christos turned around in the saddle to look back. All he could see of Eleni were two white spots made by her apron and her face. It was the last time he would ever see her.
The exodus to the caves took place almost two years after the day Christos left Eleni, neither of them suspecting that there was a new life growing in Eleni’s womb. During that time the impending war that Nassios thought would be good for business had grown into a tidal wave which had already inundated Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. Now it had spilled over the tops of the Mourgana mountains into Greece.
After two days of being crowded into the caves, the villagers grew short-tempered and food supplies ran out. Some women ventured down to their homes to make fresh bread, then returned with the news that the Italians had advanced no closer than the distant ridges of Plokista and the village of Povla, and seemed uninterested in crossing the foothills to scale the mountains.
Apprehensively, the villagers returned to their homes. Life settled into a tense normalcy, although Eleni left her treasures hidden in the oak tree, and the old men of the village who were not away on their annual working journeys or fighting in the army cleaned their hunting rifles.
A few days later a small patrol of Italian soldiers arrived in Lia, guided by local Chams, including Mourtos the mule driv
er. The Italians were polite to the terrified villagers as they searched their houses for weapons.
When the patrol was leaving the gate of the Gatzoyiannis house, Eleni pulled Mourtos aside and asked him for news of the war. The young Turk whom Christos called his friend turned on her with a look of triumphant hatred. “The Italians have promised to make all of Epiros, as far as Preveza, part of Albania, as Allah willed it,” he said. “Moslems will rule here as before. The Italians will be in Preveza tonight, and in Athens by the end of the month!”
Both Mourtos and Mussolini were disappointed in their expectations of an easy victory. Fourteen miles inside the Greek border, the Italians were stopped for days by a ragged army of soldiers in mismatched uniforms and shepherds’ cloaks. Outnumbered two to one, the Greeks astonished the Italian generals with their courage and the accuracy of their artillery, although they had only six mortars for each division against the invaders’ sixty.
An early and bitter winter fought on the Greek side. Freezing rains flooded the Kalamas River, which cuts off the northwestern corner of Greece, turning it into an impassable yellow torrent, clogged by dead animals and the rubble of blown-up bridges. In the pass above Metsovo called Katara (“the Curse”) Italy’s proud Alpinists of the Julia Division became victims of the white death, which turned their legs and feet black and swollen like potatoes.
They rubbed mud on their shiny black-plumed helmets, which seemed to draw the Greek mortar shells. They slept in the yellow mud, their once white puttees sodden and heavy. They urinated on their frozen fingers and learned to crack open the skulls of the donkeys dying of exhaustion and use the steaming brains for warmth. In the end, 12,368 Italians returned home mutilated by frostbite, 13,755 were buried in the mud of Greece, and another 25,067 were missing.
Within a month of the invasion, the Greeks drove the Italians back into Albania and kept on going. On the morning of November 21, the villagers of Lia saw the denouement of the Italian campaign taking place in the hills below them.
Greek troops attacked and routed the Italians at Plokista to the south. The Liotes, looking down from their vantage point near the top of the natural amphitheater, watched as the fleeing Italian troops left their animals, supplies and guns and took to their heels, scrambling up the side of the bowl created by the Mourgana like an army of ants in disarray, retreating on bloody, frostbitten feet right through their village toward Albania, leaving many dead and wounded: gray-green forms that stiffened in the mud. When the last of the Italians had gone, with the Greek soldiers at their heels, some of the villagers began to climb down to the battlefield to strip the corpses of anything useful.
Among the scavengers was Foto Gatzoyiannis, who returned to his house triumphantly carrying a pair of fine leather boots and two dismembered fingers, sliced from an Italian corpse, still encircled by gold rings. His wife Alexo, horrified, begged him to take the plunder back. Belongings stolen from the dead brought harami (“bitterness”) to their taker, and she feared God would make their children pay for his sacrilege. Foto was unconcerned. “I’ll handle God!” he roared at her. “You clean the boots!”
The villagers had finished with the Italian corpses by the time the carrion birds began to circle. The Greek peasants were disappointed to discover that contrary to the popular rumor, not one of the dead Italians was wearing silk underwear.
The Greek forces pursued the fleeing Italians all the way into Albania, and by December of 1940 they had even taken the port of Aghies Sarantes, which had been renamed Edda by the Italians in honor of Mussolini’s daughter. The entire Western world took hope from the incredible Greek victory, the first defeat of the Axis powers. The Greeks went mad with pride and patriotism; church bells rang, flags blossomed everywhere and pedestrians shouted “On to Rome!” In Nashelis’ coffeehouse in Lia the drinks were free and the walls fluttered with tacked-up newspaper clippings about the triumph.
But the rejoicing was short-lived. Hitler had to enter the fray, not to save Mussolini’s face but to secure his own southern flank for the invasion of Russia. He threw at the Greeks four panzer divisions, eleven motorized divisions, the Luftwaffe, and his elite corps of parachutists. The German war machine mowed over the Bulgarian border into Greece on April 6, 1941. There was no hope of resistance. Within days, every Greek airplane had been destroyed.
As the king’s brother was knocking at the door of the mansion of Prime Minister Alexander Koryzis, who had taken over after Metaxas’ death from cancer, he heard a gunshot inside. The prime minister had just blown his brains out. King George II and his government escaped to Crete, and then to Cairo, where he remained in exile for the duration. On April 26, as the last British tank rolled past the old flower market in Omonia Square, leaving Athens just ahead of the Germans, the abandoned shopowners threw blossoms in its path, then closed their stalls and went home to wait.
On April 27, 1941, the streets were empty and all windows were shuttered as the Germans marched into Athens and raised the swastika on the flag pole high atop the Acropolis.
The arrival of the Germans isolated Greece from the rest of the world, cutting off vital imports to a land that could grow only 40 percent of its food. As the Greeks braced themselves for the occupation, Eleni Gatzoyiannis saw her worst fears becoming a reality. Her life line to Christos had been broken. There would be no more money. There was not even the chance to ask him how to save herself and the children. She had always relied on tradition or a man to tell her what to do. But war washed away all laws except the fundamental one of survival.
She missed her mother-in-law more than ever. Fotini had been her closest friend and adviser. But even when her husband died, leaving her destitute, Fotini had brothers and grown sons to help her fend off starvation. Eleni was more alone than her mother-in-law had ever been, for she had only five small children, all dependent on her for their lives. For the first time she realized that there would be no one else to share her burden, and not even the example set by her mother-in-law could help her through the ordeal ahead.
During the first winter of the occupation, 1941–42, the blockaded cities and the mountain villages, cut off from the plains which had supplied them with grain, salt and oil, suffered the most. Athens became a nightmare landscape of skeletal figures with bellies swollen, shuffling hopelessly in search of food, falling dead and lying unburied in the streets. The children and the elderly died first.
In the first two months of winter, 300,000 people starved to death in the capital. In order to keep the deceased’s ration cards, families did not report deaths but threw the corpses surreptitiously over the walls of cemeteries. Every morning trucks patrolled the streets, picking up the bodies of those who had died in the night. There were rats and the smell of sewage everywhere.
The ration cards were nearly worthless, since bread was nonexistent, the food shops closed and shuttered. The smallest purchase required sacks of paper money, and cemeteries were ravaged by graverobbers looking for gold teeth and rings. If a baker happened to find enough flour to bake and sell a loaf of bread, he set the price in British gold sovereigns.
Everyone who could walk spent the entire day until curfew searching for food. The poor stripped the countryside of greens for miles outside of Athens. Trees in the avenues and parks were cut down for firewood. Servants of the wealthy were sent to outlying villages and islands with family treasures in search of a loaf of bread or a chicken.
Babies were born without fingernails, and nine out of ten of them died within a month. There were epidemics of cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, scurvy, enteric fever, and everywhere, typhus spread by lice.
Stewed cat passed for rabbit, barley would have to do for coffee. The only dinner party in Athens featuring real meat and wine was given by Greece’s most successful undertaker for eight of his gourmet friends, whom he sent home through the German patrols after curfew hidden in back of one of his hearses.
Nighttime brought mass executions of Greek prisoners accused of sabotage. By day the str
eets around the palace of Archbishop Damaskinos were black with crowds of gaunt women and children begging for news of their imprisoned men.
The towering, white-bearded archbishop moved between the Greeks and the Germans, pleading for food for the starving, and news of the prisoners. Shortly after Christmas Day he defied German orders by digging up the graves of fourteen newly killed men so that the bodies could be blessed and identified.
When two hundred prisoners were secretly shot in a mass execution, Damaskinos obtained their clothes, which had been stripped from the bodies, and hung them on lines strung across the great hall of his palace. Then he opened the doors to the women who, with their children, moved between the ranks of bloodstained clothes—stylish suits and muddy peasants’ rags—fearfully searching for those of a husband or son. A bride of a month found the clothes her husband had worn at their wedding; a mother identified the clothes of both her sons. The archbishop’s staff watched in horror as one woman after another fell to the floor shrieking, clutching a bloodstained jacket, while others, numb with dread, tore through the pockets of a familiar-looking coat, searching for some certain identification in bits of paper, cigarette butts and combs.
During the winter of 1941 in Athens, packs of stray dogs howled on the hills below the Acropolis, mass graves were dug in the gardens of the royal palace, and death waited on every street corner.
THE FIRST FOODSTUFF to disappear from Lia in the springtime of the German occupation was coffee, Eleni Gazoyiannis’ special passion. It was replaced by a weak brew of ground, toasted barley or chickpeas. Soon rice was gone too, and like the other women in Lia, Eleni used the little wheat that remained instead, grinding it between stones into a coarse rice substitute called kofto. Because wheat was too precious to use for flour, white bread was supplanted with rough corn bread, called bobota, which would become the staple diet of the villages throughout the occupation.
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