In the good chamber of her house, the room reserved for special occasions, where the family’s wealth was displayed, Eleni sorted out the possessions that she might be able to trade for corn.
The Gatzoyiannis’ good chamber was more splendid than any other in Lia, dominated by the great brass bed, which was used only when Christos was in residence. In the eastern corner, in the glass-and-wood family iconostasis, a garnet-colored lamp burned before the figure of the Virgin frozen in a presentiment of sorrow, holding her Child in dark, narrow hands, the ruby glass and her silver ornamentation scattering stars of light on the whitewashed walls.
Eleni picked up the engraved golden pitcher from Constantinople. On a wooden table nearby were the sewing machine and her beloved gramophone, which each would bring two hundred pounds of corn if she could carry them.
From her dowry chest Eleni removed the filigreed silver belt buckle and necklaces of coins from her wedding costume. They were folded between linen sheets and thick American blankets, the only ones in the village. She took out a warm peacock-blue blanket and looked at it thoughtfully, struck by an idea. Then she reached for her scissors.
Two days before Christmas, Eleni told the children that there would be no roast kid for the feast. Yiorgi Mitros, who owned the mill above their house, had agreed to buy the twin baby goats in exchange for corn flour. The news was greeted with a general outburst of misery. Fotini wailed the loudest, because the kids had been her pets, but Eleni grimly tied a rope around their necks, and ignoring the bedlam, led them up the mountain. When she returned from the mill with two heavy bags of corn flour, no one spoke to her.
The day before Christmas was haunted by memories. On Christmas Eve in the past, Eleni would set the table for the next day, which was also her husband’s name day, when half the village would come to eat and pay their compliments. There would be the sweet Christ’s bread, which took nearly a full day to make and decorate, a laurel leaf finishing each arm of the cross. The bread was set in the place of honor, surrounded by honey, fruit, walnuts, wine and a minimum of nine cooked dishes for good luck. But this Christmas Eve, no one mentioned the Christ’s bread or the holiday ahead.
Only one ragged trio of urchins had come by to sing the kalanda in the doorway, to the accompaniment of their metal triangles. “In the blessed hour, Christ is born, as the new moon,” their shrill voices caroled in the softly falling snow, and because she had nothing else to give them, Eleni put the last of the walnuts into their hands. Her children fell asleep early, huddled together under their velenzes, wearing, as always, the same clothes they had worn all day long.
On Christmas morning Olga awoke to find a brilliant blue dress hanging on her wall hook, made from the American blanket, complete with three black stripes pieced out of one of Eleni’s old aprons. Eleni had even made Olga and Kanta new kerchiefs, cut from the linen sheets, fringed and dyed burgundy with the root of the alizarin tree.
Olga tore off her black dress and buttoned up the new one over her shift. It wasn’t velvet, but it fit snugly over her budding bosom and flared out at the skirt, making her waist look even smaller. She tied the wine-colored kerchief over her long braids and knotted it at the nape of the neck, letting a daring inch of auburn hair show at the temples.
The other girls marveled as Olga twisted this way and that, trying to see the total effect in the small hand mirror.
“I’m beautiful!” she announced, pirouetting in the center of the room. “Every single person in church will be staring at me!”
“At your feet, probably!” retorted Kanta.
Olga looked down. Her toes were visible through the holes in her flat leather shoes—the last pair Eleni had bought before the war.
“I don’t see why you won’t be sensible and put on the new patikia your uncle made you!” Eleni complained.
At her mother’s reprimand, Olga raised her chin and clicked her tongue “no.” “I’m not going to church on Christmas Day wearing rubber sandals!” she said. “These shoes may be full of holes, but at least they’re real shoes!”
Eleni sighed and said nothing. Olga was becoming far too spirited for a well-brought-up young girl.
The bells of the Church of the Holy Trinity called the faithful out into a heavy snowstorm. Eleni carried Nikola wrapped in her shawl, followed by the girls. Despite the angry scene with her father, she stopped by to congratulate him on his name day, because it was his festival as well as Christos’, but when they reached her parents’ house, Megali said that Kitso had left on a mysterious errand two days before, revealing only that he was going to Lista, a village three miles to the southeast.
The path to the church was treacherous, flooded in several spots by swollen streams, but as they approached the square, the windows of Holy Trinity glowed invitingly through the fallen snow. Inside, the air was heavy with incense and the warmth of many bodies. The men and boys stood toward the front, the old and infirm leaning on their elbows against the arms of the seatless miserere stalls that lined the sides of the nave. The women and small children stood at the back, watching as each new arrival lit a candle and kissed the icon of the Nativity.
Father Zisis chanted the ancient verses of St. Basil, but few members of the congregation paid strict attention. They were whispering together, catching up on neighbors they hadn’t seen since the first snows, and eying the finery that the others had managed to assemble on this bitterest of Christmases.
Olga had been right; she was the center of attention. Men in the front of the church turned around to stare at the flushed cheeks and downcast eyes under the burgundy kerchief, her white skin set off by a dress as blue as the Virgin’s robes. Father Zisis frowned at the distraction and chanted louder, the altar boys swinging their censers faster in accompaniment.
Olga crossed herself as frequently as the most pious woman in the church, and only occasionally stole a glance at the congregation to measure the impression she was making. But her moment of glory was soon eclipsed by the arrival of a family who were strangers to most of the assemblage. As they entered the narthex, even the priest turned around to look. A buzz arose like the sound of a thousand bees.
At the head of the group was a middle-aged woman in black leaning on the arm of a thin young man with a face the color of parchment. It was the two girls behind them, though, who made the congregation stare. They wore printed dresses of a clinging fabric, visible under light cloth coats. It was their hair that attracted all eyes. Outside of the big cities no one in the village had ever seen women with uncovered bobbed hair, but the curls of these two swung shamelessly above their shoulders, bare beneath the eyes of Christ the Ail-Powerful, who glowered down from the vault of the central dome.
The younger of the two young women was pretty and blond, and she returned the disapproving stares of the congregation defiantly. The Gatzoyiannis children sucked in their breath and stared with a mixture of fascination and horror at the girl. Eleni saw that the newcomers wore no shoes, only sodden knee-high knitted stockings. Olga noticed only that all the men were no longer looking at her.
Before the church service was over, everyone knew that the strangers were the widow Alexandra Botsaris and three of her five children. The woman’s husband, the tinker Vasilis Botsaris, had taken his family from Lia to Athens eight years before but had died almost immediately. The boy, Yiorgos, now twenty-two, had contracted tuberculosis fighting in the Italian campaign and was evicted from the hospital when the food ran out. The widow Botsaris had brought her children back to escape from the famine in Athens, but there was nothing left for them in the village; even their deserted house had been turned into a stable.
After church Eleni took her family over to speak to her old friend. Yiorgos was coughing badly, and the two girls, Demetroula, twenty, and Angeliki, eighteen, were shivering in their thin city clothes.
The two families walked home together. On the way Eleni and the children stopped at the Botsaris house. They were appalled to see that not a pane of glass was intact; t
he corners of the hovel were heaped with dirty hay. Snow drifted through the holes in the walls. The only furnishings were sleeping velenzes. Alexandra told Eleni how they had left everything—clothing, pots, pieces of furniture—in Yannina when they could no longer hitch a ride and were forced to set out on foot over the two-day journey from the provincial capital, sleeping in hay sheds, their feet so swollen they couldn’t force them into their shoes anymore.
She described the horrors of the famine in Athens, the anonymous children lying dead at their doorstep, her daughters walking ten miles out of town to steal greens from other people’s fields at night. There was not an olive, not so much as a raisin left on the vines for miles beyond the city, she said. When the children were given a loaf of bread by a sympathetic baker in Yannina, their stomachs were so unused to food that they rolled on the floor with stomach cramps.
“But you have nothing here, Alexandra!” Eleni exclaimed. “The house is a ruin, you have no crops, no wood, no food—how will you survive?”
“I’d rather my children died in Lia than in Athens,” the widow replied. “I’ve heard that women here are selling salt to the Albanians for corn. When I’m stronger, I’ll walk to the sea.”
Eleni saw hope in the sunken face. She took her friend’s hand. “Then we can climb the mountain together,” she said.
When they crossed their own threshold, a tantalizing aroma from the kitchen greeted the Gatzoyiannis family. Eleni remembered the surprise and went to the fireplace, where she brushed away the glowing coals heaped over the gastra, a flat, covered copper pan. She lifted the lid, and the scent of meat rose like incense. Glykeria began squealing with excitement and the others ran to see. The pan was full of steaming briami—a mixture of boiled ricelike kofto and mountain herbs, studded with thick chunks of liver.
“Christ and the Virgin Mary!” exulted Glykeria. “Meat! Where did you get it?”
Eleni smiled. “I told Yiorgi Mitros, when he slaughtered the kids, to save me the liver and pay me that much less corn.”
The children ate with their hands, sitting cross-legged around the low table, stuffing bits of the savory stew into their mouths. When they were finished, Eleni’s plate was nearly untouched.
“I’ll eat that if you don’t want it!” Glykeria and Kanta said in unison.
Eleni shook her head. “Today is the day when every house prepares a plate for the stranger who is the Christ child in disguise,” she said. “This is His portion, and I’m going to send it to the Botsaris family.”
A chorus of protests drowned out her voice. The first meat they’d seen all year! Giving it away to strangers!
Eleni silenced them with a look. “Olga’s going to take it to them now,” she declared, in a tone that permitted no argument. She watched Olga flush an angry red, then added, “As soon as you’ve put on your new patikia.”
New Year’s Eve passed without the usual fortunetelling rituals because no one had the heart to ask about the future. Shortly after, on January 6, came the annual celebration of the Epiphany, the blessing of the waters. Father Zisis made his rounds of the village, sanctifying each house by sprinkling the corners with a sprig of sweet basil dipped in holy water.
After the priest’s blessing, Eleni set out to make name day calls, for Epiphany—ta fata—is the feast of every Fotios and Fotini, and Eleni intended to visit Foto Gatzoyiannis and her young second cousin, Fotis Haidis, who lived in the other half of her parents’ divided house. Megali was there already, looking worried. Kitso had sent a message, she said, demanding that Eleni come at once to meet him in Lista.
Leaving the children with their grandmother, Eleni immediately set out on the two-hour walk over the mountain paths. She found her father sitting in the main coffeehouse in Lista with a grizzled old man whom he introduced as the miller Yiori Stolis. Somewhat flushed with plum raki, Kitso informed Eleni that she could give up her plan of walking to Albania. Stolis had agreed to rent Kitso his mill on the Kefalovriso River in exchange for fifty okas of flour a month.
Light-headed with relief, Eleni sat down in a chair in that exclusively male bastion and began to thank the old man for his kindness, but he waved away her gratitude. “No, it’s your father who’s done me a favor!” he said. “The mill has been idle since the Germans came. The whole region is crawling with bandits! I was afraid for my life.”
Eleni turned to look at Kitso, who got up abruptly and ordered her to follow him. He would take her to Kefalovriso and give her a sack of corn flour to take home, he said. She should come back with the mule every month to get more.
On the way, struggling to keep up with her father’s stride, Eleni worried aloud that he was risking his life. “You’ll be robbed and we’ll find you dead one morning!” she said.
Kitso shrugged. “You know well enough that I can protect myself against thugs!”
It was the closest he had ever come to acknowledging the secret they shared. Eleni had never spoken of the murder of the Turkish brigand, and now that he referred to it obliquely, she fell silent. As they neared the turnoff to Kefalovriso, she awkwardly began to thank him for finding a way to feed her children.
“I don’t give charity and I don’t take charity,” Kitso replied curtly. “I’ll keep your family alive until the war is over, and in exchange, your husband will support me and your mother in our old age.”
Eleni protested that she would do that anyway, but he cut her off. “I don’t want any favors. This is a business arrangement!”
As the pair approached the mill, walking along the well-traveled road that led to the Kalamas and on toward Yannina, they encountered a large gray mule, plodding head down in the opposite direction, loaded with two huge baskets full of oranges. Eleni reached for its reins, but her father pulled her back.
“It must have gotten away from someone!” she protested.
“Don’t touch it!” snapped her father. He saw her questioning look and continued reluctantly, “It’s Griva, the mule of the tinker Nikola Koukas. It knows the way back to Lia.”
Eleni was afraid that something had happened to Koukas. Perhaps he had been set upon by brigands.
Her father knew better. He had seen the traffic along this road during the days he was working at the new mill. “Leave it alone. There’s something in those baskets besides oranges,” he advised her. “That’s why Koukas is letting the mule go on ahead of him through the Italian checkpoints. If they search the baskets and find things that shouldn’t be there, they can’t connect it with him.”
“What things?” Eleni asked, mystified.
“Guns. Messages. Who knows?”
Eleni insisted that he tell her what he was hinting at.
“Better to be ignorant,” he snorted, but finally he gave in. “Prokopi Skevis is sneaking around, talking to fools like Koukas, filling them with ideas about armed resistance and open revolution,” he said. “It’s an epidemic! Costa, my own brother’s son, is one of them. They hold meetings in our mill! Idiots from all over the Mourgana. Prokopi calls them and they come.”
That was the first Eleni had heard of it and her reaction was to worry that the young men would get themselves killed, leaving their wives and mothers a bitter cup to drink. As they walked farther, she spied two tiny figures climbing the ribbon of road that curved below them. They were Nikola Koukas and Prokopi Skevis following far behind the mule.
“What did I tell you?” Kitso exploded. He warned Eleni that they should leave the road and take an overland path to the mill rather than encounter them. Before turning away, he extended his palm toward them, fingers spread, in the familiar imprecatory gesture. “May they go to the devil!” he muttered. “They’re going to bring the Germans down on us like the ten plagues of Egypt. Any fool can throw a stone into the sea, but once he does, a hundred wise men can’t pull it out.”
One June morning in 1942, the peasants of the small village of Domnitsa, 185 miles northwest of Athens, were startled to see a detachment of fifteen heavily armed men marching into t
heir main square behind a bugler and the Greek flag, the sun reflecting on the bandoliers across their chests and the damascened daggers thrust into their belts. Their leader, a short, husky man with a fierce black beard and the eyes of a hunter, stepped forward to address the astonished villagers: “Patriots! I am Aris Velouchiotis, colonel of artillery. Starting today, I am raising the banner of revolt against the forces occupying our beloved country! The handful of men you see before you will soon become an army of thousands.”
He was not telling the truth about his name or military rank, but his prediction about his little band was accurate. It would grow into a vast resistance force, the Greek Popular Liberation Army, known by its Greek initials, ELAS. And “Kapetan Aris,” its thirty-six-year-old leader, would become a legend throughout Greece, electrifying the peasants with his daring, annoying his Communist Party bosses by his tendency to make independent decisions.
Aris was really Athanasios Klaras, a lawyer’s son and agronomy student. An active Communist by the time he was drafted, he was sent in 1925 to the disciplinary company at Kalpaki, Epiros. Nearby was the school at Vela, where the Skevis brothers from Lia had won places through the machinations of their father, and where they were indoctrinated by Communist soldiers from the camp. Aris spent most of the next fourteen years in prison or island exile but was released in 1939 after signing a “declaration of repentance,” for which the hard-line Communists would never quite forgive him.
As Aris was to become the hero of the left, his opposite number, the resistance hero of the right, was a portly fifty-one-year-old retired army colonel named Napoleon Zervas who had a weakness for gambling, drink and good food that hardly fitted the Spartan ideal of a guerrilla leader. On July 23, 1942, a month after Aris’ debut in Domnitsa, Zervas left Athens to form his own resistance army in the mountains of his native Epiros. He soon had grown a beard as thick as Aris’ and collected a small but tough force that persisted throughout the occupation, while other non-Communist resistance groups were crushed by Aris’ leftist ELAS. Zervas called his rightist army EDES, the initials of the National Democratic Greek League.
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