The unseasonable cold added to the miseries of the first winter of the occupation. From November on it snowed every day. As the drifts became deeper, the number of students shrank to those who lived a stone’s throw from the school. Children often fainted in class. Minas doggedly continued to chant his lessons, determined to carry on until there were no students left to listen. But when Father Zisis began draping the white satin Christmas banners on the altar of the Church of the Holy Trinity next door, there were only six students still attending school. Among those who had disappeared were Kanta and Glykeria Gatzoyiannis.
In the kitchen of the Gatzoyiannis house the girls contemplated their portions of the white, viscous shilira, Kanta complaining that the very sight of it made her sick. Eleni told them sharply to eat it; they wouldn’t see any more for the next two weeks. Their suddenly hopeful faces fell as she reminded them that the Christmas fast was beginning. From now on, milk, eggs, cheese—anything that came from an animal with blood—was prohibited until the feast day.
Clutching her belly histrionically, Glykeria wailed that God couldn’t be cruel enough to expect them to fast when they were already starving. In the unhappy silence that followed, she began to console herself aloud with fantasies of the roast kid they would have on Christmas Day, garnished with potatoes, savory with oregano and garlic, dripping with juices. Eleni couldn’t bring herself to tell them there would be no meat for Christmas; they couldn’t afford to slaughter one of their half-dozen remaining goats for a single meal when it could be traded for two weeks’ worth of corn flour. Her children were still too young and spoiled to imagine that one of the two great feast days of the year could pass without a taste of meat. Her voice hard, Eleni lectured the girls that they would survive the fasting days well enough eating potatoes, boiled greens and bobota; they should be grateful they had that.
Olga was sulking. Her mind was concerned not with food but with the other privilege that came with Christmas. The joyful mass on Christmas Day was one of the two occasions in the year when the eligible men in the village had an opportunity to appraise the charms of prospective brides.
“Why should I fast when I couldn’t possibly take communion?” Olga burst out. “You can’t expect me to show myself to the village like this.” She had on her only dress, black wool, shiny with age and patched at the elbows. Eleni sighed and didn’t answer. Olga, nearly fourteen, was a headstrong girl who believed that life was not worth living without a bright velvet dress, trimmed with the three black stripes of braid on bodice and skirt to indicate a family of high status.
A few nights later, after a sullen meal of bobota and greens boiled with onions, Eleni examined the stores in the small room behind the good chamber. The wooden chests full of dried cod and the canned goods that Christos had laid in on his last visit were depleted long ago, and now even the dried figs and the olive oil were nearly gone. Garlands of onions, garlic and mountain tea whispered as she passed. There was a slice of moon hanging outside the window, surrounded by the haze that promises snow.
Back in the kitchen, Eleni sat down on the floor next to the wooden cradle. Nikola was chewing his fist in his sleep, his eyes sunken, his thin face looking like a worried old man’s. His features—small, finely chiseled mouth, wide forehead, high cheekbones and deep-set eyes—were copies of her own, but his fair hair was lighter than her chestnut braids.
Eleni always regarded her son with wonder. Afraid that the intensity of her love for him would attract the evil eye, she tucked paper images of saints into his clothing for protection. He was her pride and her obsession, and the greatest happiness she had ever known was the day of his birth, July 23, 1939.
It had happened on the third day of the annual festival in honor of the village’s patron saint, the Prophet Elias. The saint’s pagan predecessor had been Helios, the sun god, and on every July 20th, in a ritual that was thousands of years old, the inhabitants of this mountain climbed to the highest peak as dawn broke, lit bonfires, sacrificed a rooster and prayed for a year of fine weather. After the prayers at dawn, the Liotes descended to the Vrisi, the triangle of flatland just below the peak where the itinerant dark-skinned yifti musicians were ready with clarinet, fiddle and tambourine to begin the dancing and feasting.
Eleni had stayed behind in the Perivoli, knowing her time was near. On the third day she sent Olga up to the dancing field to bring the midwife, Vasilena Kyrkou, and Eleni’s sister-in-law Alexo Gatzoyiannis, who had agreed to assist at the birth.
The two arrived shortly after noon, giddy with the dancing and wine, and found Eleni lying curled up, her body focused on the pains. The midwife put on a clean apron and began boiling a narcotic tea from the flowers of the village’s only lime tree while Alexo massaged Eleni’s belly.
The girls huddled on the other side of the closed kitchen door, frightened by their mother’s groans. As the hours passed, Eleni’s mother crept into the kitchen and crouched in the corner, waiting like a thin, sharp-beaked black bird. The good-natured midwife whispered to Eleni that her father, Kitso, was puttering in the garden outside, staying within earshot while pretending to take no interest in what was happening. Although he would never show his feelings, the miller was undoubtedly reflecting that he had fathered six daughters, four of them dead, one sterile and the last a mother of four girls. If he was ever to see a male descendant to his line, this was his last chance.
As the sun set, the shadows of the cypresses around St. Demetrios were reaching up the mountainside when the midwife announced that the baby was ready to come. Alexo helped Eleni stand. Vasilena threw a sash over one of the ceiling beams, and while Alexo clutched her in a bear hug, holding her up, Eleni pulled on the sash with all the strength she had left.
The rhythmic contractions, faster now, with no respite, carried Eleni off on a tide of pain, her only anchor the strong grip of her sister-in-law. She moaned with each wave, pulling on the sash, the muscles of her belly like iron bands. There was a pain worse than all the others, a rush of blood, and the baby was expelled into the midwife’s waiting hands as Eleni lost consciousness and Alexo gently lowered her to the floor.
Quickly Vasilena wrapped the child, glancing mischievously in the direction of Megali, and sighing, “Oh dear, another girl!” The old woman threw her apron over her head and began to keen, but the midwife’s next words silenced her. Calling Olga from the hall, Vasilena said, “Go out into the garden, child, and get me your grandfather’s hat!”
The word “hat” set everyone screaming. Olga, Alexo, Megali, Kanta and Glykeria rushed to see what the midwife held. They all knew why she wanted Kitso’s hat: the bearer of great news, shariki, must snatch the hat off the head of the lucky recipient until it is ransomed with money. Vasilena had news for Kitso Haidis that was worth a sovereign at least. But she never got his hat. The moment Olga asked for it, the white-haired miller seized the girl with a cry and swung her around—the first time anyone had ever seen him embrace one of his granddaughters.
There was a babble of female voices around Eleni’s pallet and then one deep one, her father’s, shouting, “If you’re torturing me with a joke, midwife, I’ll kill you! Let me see the boy!”
The word “boy” seemed to echo and re-echo. Eleni opened her eyes to see the midwife grinning, holding in her white apron a red thing, surely too tiny to be human, flexing and unflexing and mewling angrily. Eleni reached out to take him. Her body felt the first raw pain of separation and of loving too much. She lay back against the pillow. At last she had fulfilled her purpose as a woman.
In the twenty-nine months that passed, the tiny creature grew to fill the empty places in her life: the absence of her husband, the void caused by her mother-in-law’s death. But in December of 1941 when Eleni looked at the boy, she saw how thin the little arms had become and she was seized by a fear greater than any that had gone before: Nikola was starving to death.
The only quarter she could turn to for help was her father. Kitso had always been cold and silent to his child
ren, and Eleni had longed to marry to escape his tyranny. But beneath the hard words and silences that passed between father and daughter, she knew there was love as well as anger. Her father surely could not refuse to save his only grandson. So Eleni wrapped her cape around her, closed the door on the sleeping children and set out down the mountain to her father’s house.
As a child I found my grandfather a terrifying, fascinating, mysterious figure, the one model I had to teach me what it meant to be a man. I remember always being afraid in his presence, of his distant coldness and the sudden flashes of violent temper.
Kitso Haidis was a legend in the village for his cunning and for his reputation as a womanizer. In his youth he had been as handsome as the languid mountain war lords in a nineteenth-century engraving, with high cheekbones, luxuriant black hair and heavy brows above startlingly blue eyes. As he aged, his features never softened, while his hair and mustache turned entirely white. His cleverness won him respect throughout Lia and he was elected president of the village twice. He and his two brothers’ families took turns operating the southernmost mill for two years at a time, and when it was my grandfather’s turn, business improved noticeably. When he wasn’t working the family mill, he was in demand to travel to other villages, building and repairing mills and running them, for a percentage of the profits, until they were flourishing.
My grandfather’s reputation as a Lothario only added luster to his name. In a society as rigid and devoid of privacy as the mountain villages, adultery was almost impossible and it could mean death for both parties, but everyone whispered that Kitso Haidis did more than grind flour for his women customers, and was smart enough never to get caught in the act.
Although he was the most lavish host in Lia on the occasions of his name day or the feast of his house, he was a miser and tyrant to his own family. My mother often told us how our grandmother would post her daughters as lookouts when she made herself the forbidden luxury of a cup of coffee. If Kitso suddenly appeared at the gate, Megali would toss the coffee into the fire and have the cup wiped clean before he got in the door. Kitso had taken her as a bride when she was fourteen, and for the next seventy-one years she suffered his adulteries and his brutal temper with the patience of a saint.
Although he never struck me, his only grandson, I feared and avoided him as a child. It was with great trepidation that I returned to the village in 1963 to the house of the eighty-three-year-old grandfather I hadn’t seen for fourteen years. He was exactly as I remembered him, with the same vigor and mesmerizing presence, but he seemed astonished to find me an adult, with features that mirrored his own. He was never a man who could bare his feelings, but he tried in his own way to build a bond between us, to win my admiration. I recall one afternoon when we were sitting in the village cafenion and several men began arguing about what was the most important quality for having success with women. “Good looks,” said one. “Money,” suggested another. “A way with words,” argued a third. Then my grandfather leaned forward with an air that silenced the room. “The one key to success with women,” he said, glancing in my direction, “is the ability to recognize those who want it.” Clearly, his reputation was well earned.
On the last night of my visit, as my grandfather and I sat in the darkness near his hearth, his face in shadow, he began to talk, and I sensed that he wanted to say something that was difficult for him. He told me that in the summer of 1916, when he was renting and operating a mill outside the village of Yeromeri, he killed a man. It was a Turkish brigand who came to him and threatened to burn his mill or worse unless he paid protection money every month, a common form of exploitation in those days. My grandfather agreed, plied the Turk with tsipouro, and then, when his guard was down, killed him with an ax. Working quickly, he redirected the millstream escaping from the chutes into a half-circular ditch which was there in case the machinery needed repair, pulled up the stones lining the channel and buried the Turk’s body in the red clay, where it probably still lies today, deep below the ice-cold water that turns the millstones.
My grandfather never told anyone about the murder, unlike my uncle Foto, who often bragged about killing the Turk who insulted his wife. I understood that he was telling me the story as a kind of peace offering. There had been only one other person who knew his secret, he said. My mother, a nine-year-old girl at the time, had been visiting him at the rented mill, sleeping in the loft, and saw the killing. “She never told anyone,” my grandfather said quietly in the darkness, “but I could always see it in her eyes.”
We sat in silence as I considered his revelation. I knew how difficult it was for him to expose himself to me even this much. Before he died four years later, at the age of eighty-seven, he never apologized for his treatment of my mother and his grandchildren, or spoke of his feelings about her execution. Although he would never admit it, I knew that even an affirmed cynic like my grandfather subscribed to the universally held village belief that God often visits the sins of the father on the children.
With his confession, he had also given me the key to understanding the thorny relationship he and my mother shared throughout their lives. Every time he looked into his daughter’s eyes he read there not only fear but also an unspoken accusation. She understood him better than any other person on earth, and he could not forget it. Her knowledge and her silence must have been a constant rebuke to him.
When Eleni entered her father’s door on that snowy evening in 1941 and saw him waiting hostilely to learn what had brought her, she tried to sound calm and businesslike. “We have the milk from the goats,” she told him, “but the corn will last only another month. The six goats are all we have left. I know Uncle Yiorgi has the mill now, but perhaps if you spoke to him, he’d lend us some flour, enough to stay alive until the mails open and Christos can pay him back.”
Kitso listened in silence, frowning. He could see it hurt her to beg, and sympathy, mixed with knowledge that he could do nothing, boiled up into anger. “Yiorgi has five children plus Mitros’ orphans to support!” he shouted. “Fourteen Haidis mouths to feed off the mill, and business down to nothing! Once you married into the Gatzoyiannis clan it became their responsibility to keep you alive, not mine! If your husband can’t help you, let his brother Foto feed you!”
Eleni bowed her head, knowing she was defeated. Her father was right and she had no hope of assistance from Foto. Only a week before, her brother-in-law had passed their gate carrying a sack full of quail; when she asked for one to make soup for the baby he refused her. Her husband had sent money to support Foto and his large family ever since 1910 when Foto was in jail for killing the Turk, and now he denied her a bird the size of a sparrow.
Eleni would not let her father see her desperation. She sat silent for a moment, thinking. There was one option left if her strength didn’t fail her. “I’ll take the things Christos gave me and sell them in Albania!” she said defiantly.
While Greece was starving, Albania was still well supplied with goods, because Mussolini had made it an Italian protectorate. On the other side of the mountains, the Albanians had plenty of corn which they were willing to trade to the Greeks in exchange for valuables. The most destitute women in Lia had been cheating starvation by walking two days to the sea at Igoumenitsa to gather salt, then bringing back as much as they could carry on their backs, and climbing over the snow-covered mountains to the landlocked Albanians, who would exchange an equal weight of corn for salt. But only the most desperate and strongest women took this expedient because the mountains were death traps of brigands, wolves and snowdrifts that had been growing since November.
Only the week before, Eleni had seen the frozen body of her neighbor Sotirena Papachristo dragged past her gate, the head thumping on the stones, mouth frozen open, eyes staring sightlessly at the sky. Sotirena and her twenty-two-year-old son George had set out for Albania, each carrying fifty pounds of salt, and on the way back, loaded down with corn, they became lost in a snowstorm and huddled together all night und
er a stand of pine trees. In the morning the boy awoke to find his mother stiff and blue. His cries roused the villagers, who rushed up the mountain, wrapped her in a blanket and dragged her down the path to her house. Eleni followed the procession into the woman’s good chamber, bare except for a rough wooden table, on which they laid her while her three youngest children shrank from the sight of their mother. When the women turned Sotirena to close her eyes, a gargling moan broke from her throat, and her son fainted. The women rushed to massage Sotirena’s hands and feet, but as soon as they touched her they knew she was now dead beyond question. The sound had been her soul leaving her body, they agreed. Three days later the villagers saw crows circling over the spot where Sotirena had dropped her bags of corn. They gathered the kernels and dried them in the stone oven so her children could have the food she died bringing them.
Eleni thought of Sotirena’s face in death and shuddered, but her father’s angry refusal to help had resolved her to follow the dead woman’s path over the Albanian border.
Kitso stared in shock at her words, then began to mock his daughter. Three years ago she was too ill to walk, and now she was planning to climb through the snow to Albania. Wouldn’t it be quicker to jump into the ravine and have done with it? No one had told her to have five children!
The more he taunted her, the more determined Eleni became. If it was the only way to feed her children, then she would find the physical strength somehow to climb the mountain as soon as the Christmas holidays were over. She stood up and put on her cape, then stormed out the door, her eyes as hard as her father’s.
“Yes, get yourself killed!” Kitso shouted after her. “Leave five orphans! Then who will be stuck with putting food into their mouths?”
Eleni Page 9
