While Fotini was struggling with Glykeria’s hair, Nikola rolled over on the cement slab and suddenly plunged from the top of the gate and fell the eight feet to the stone walk below, landing on the back of his head. He was stunned for a moment, then emitted a terrific wail. Glykeria rushed over to find blood from a gash in the back of his skull trickling down his neck. Nikola cried louder, but the neighborhood was deserted and there was no adult to help. Glykeria felt acutely that she was only ten years old and didn’t know what to do.
“You’re all right. I’ll give you a fig if you don’t cry!” she pleaded and led him into the house, where she grabbed a white pillowcase out of her mother’s dowry chest and bound it around the wound as best she could.
Sucking on the dried fig, Nikola finally stopped crying, and as soon as his sobs diminished, Glykeria regained her poise; imitating her mother, she told him to lie down and go back to sleep. He was nodding already, worn out by his ordeal, and Glykeria left him on the sleeping pallet, went back outside and told Fotini to resume combing her hair.
The battle in Keramitsa began shortly after noon. Prokopi’s band fought bravely, even though vastly outnumbered by Zervas’s EDES guerrillas and their superior weapons, but the ELAS forces were relentlessly pushed back. When Prokopi finally issued the order to retreat, everyone moved quickly, except for Vangeli Poulos, who had been manning their only machine gun with the assistance of another village boy. Vangeli was drunk with raki and courage. He refused to retreat.
The other boy did not share young Poulos’ thirst for martyrdom. They were seen by their comrades arguing fiercely as Vangeli peppered the approaching EDES troops with the last of the ammunition. At twilight, the same hour that he had killed the collaborator, Kontoris, young Vangelis Poulos became the first ELAS martyr from the village of Lia, and the first villager to die in the war. The other boy survived him by a few minutes.
In the fields of St. Nicholas, high above the village, Eleni, Olga and Kanta were near the end of an exhausting day of preparing the newly plowed earth for the spring planting. Eleni was startled by the sound of gunfire, mortars and machine guns bursting out from the southwest. She could see smoke but nothing else. It was the first time she had left Glykeria with the little ones and her mind suddenly filled with scenes of carnage and death, her children in the midst of it all. Terrified, she led the two older girls helter-skelter down the mountain.
She arrived out of breath at the gate to find Glykeria and Fotini happily eating some apricots which they had stolen from Tassos Bartzokis’ tree across the path. “Thank God!” Eleni gasped. “I heard guns! The neighborhood is empty. Where’s Nikola?”
Glykeria stopped eating and frowned. “He’s inside lying down,” she said. “He bumped his head a little, but he’s fine now.”
Eleni’s momentary relief vanished and all her premonitions of disaster returned. She rushed into the kitchen to find Nikola lying with a blood-soaked pillowcase around his head like a turban. At the sight her fears burst out in a terrible scream. When the toddler opened his eyes, she saw that he was still alive, and she managed to control her trembling hands long enough to find scissors, cut off the hair around the wound and clean it with tsipouro, all the while crooning to Nikola. She cursed herself for leaving her son, the cornerstone of her life, alone and unprotected.
As soon as the wound was dressed and she got her breath back, Eleni went after Glykeria, who was hovering on the edge of the yard. “You—you black devil, is this the way you look after your brother?” Eleni screamed, reaching down for stones to throw at the girl. Glykeria was already running as fast as her chubby legs could take her, and all the while she was shouting dramatically, “Go ahead! Kill me! I don’t care! I’m ready to die! Come down, St. Demetrios, and take me! My mother is murdering me!”
None of the stones found their mark and Eleni was tripped up in her pursuit by Fotini’s small hands grabbing at her skirt. “Glykeria didn’t do it!” Fotini pleaded. “Nikola fell off by himself! I was doing Glykeria’s hair, just like a big lady!”
“You too?” Eleni shouted, looking at the serious face and trembling lips. “Nikola’s littler than you, and you should have been looking after him!” But she sank down on the ground, her fury draining from her. Ever since Nikola’s birth Fotini had been a weepy child, who felt cheated of the attention she craved. For that reason Eleni could never bring herself to spank her, although the girl’s whining often drove her to distraction. Nor could she whip Glykeria properly, for the shameless girl, who was now disappearing down the path toward the Bartzokis house, was still shouting to all the saints in heaven to carry her away to her death. The doleful sound of her voice made Eleni laugh in spite of herself. She went back into the house to take her son in her lap, rocking him in the security of her arms.
Glykeria was still missing when Olga Venetis came up the path with the news that Prokopi’s band had been pushed back from Keramitsa and was retreating north to Kastaniani, passing right through the village. She told Eleni the news of the two boys’ deaths, which had already reached their families. Eleni looked down at Nikola, asleep in her lap, his bandage like a lopsided cap. The misgivings raised in her breast by the guerrillas’ actions had been well founded. Sons of her neighbors were being sacrificed under the banner of revolution. She would never give her son up to any cause. She turned to her neighbor. “It’s a blessing that Vangeli’s mother is not alive to suffer this!” she said harshly. “God grant that I die rather than see one of my children taken before me.”
When the news reached Lia that Zervas’ forces were on their way in pursuit of ELAS, everyone, including the Gatzoyiannis family, prepared to flee to the caves, terrified of falling into the hands of the dreaded right-wing EDES guerrillas. But Zervas’ andartes never advanced closer than Keramitsa, intimidated by the ferocity of Prokopi’s fighters and unwilling to follow them into their own mountains. When it was clear that Lia would not be occupied by EDES, Prokopi’s men returned to the village, and an uneasy waiting period began.
Although they had been defeated at Keramitsa, Prokopi was proud of the way his men had comported themselves in battle when faced with EDES’ superior strength. He had turned his army of tinkers and shepherds into a disciplined fighting unit. But the regional leaders of the Greek Communist Party, which controlled ELAS, could not forgive the defeat. They were convinced that Prokopi’s ELAS group had a fatal weakness: he allowed the Mourgana unit to be directed by a local committee rather than men hand-picked by the party leaders in Yannina. They felt he was giving his group an autonomy that undermined party discipline and weakened its military strength. The party decided to tighten the reins on the Mourgana guerrillas.
The man sent to bring the group into line was a thin, swarthy, balding Macedonian Slav who used the name “Inoes.” The villagers were surprised to see their local hero cower before this stranger. Inoes accused Prokopi of weakness because he had allowed men into his organization who were not true believers.
Prokopi was outraged at the criticism. The village was solidly behind him, he protested. “If we eliminate the local committee and put it all in the hands of the party, we’ll lose some of our best men, who aren’t Communists!” Inoes was not persuaded. The Mourgana group was taken out of Prokopi’s hands and merged into the 15th ELAS Regiment, which was under tight party control. Within a week, as Prokopi feared, a dozen of the unit’s most experienced fighters, including former army officers and the head constable, Kaloyeropoulos, took their boots in their hands and crept out of Lia; they surfaced in Keramitsa, where they joined Zervas’ rival EDES forces.
Prokopi’s humiliations were not over. Using the defections as an excuse, the party removed him from the group he had created and nurtured for two years, and exiled him to a job in a small village in the Yannina valley.
The person in Lia who benefited most from this purge was Costa Haidis, Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ cousin, who, as the local Communist Party commissar, became the most powerful man in the area. Spiro Skevis retur
ned from Preveza, where as an ELAS lieutenant he had fought more successfully than his brother. Because he supported the party’s decisions, he was given command of a company in the 15th Regiment made up mostly of men from Lia.
Surprised by the takeover of the local ELAS group, the Mourgana villagers began to understand that the movement begun locally by the Skevis brothers was being controlled by mysterious forces and extended far beyond their own local horizons. Every day new andartes passed through the village, sometimes staying overnight in the schoolhouse or demanding lodgings in village homes. Many wore unfamiliar uniforms and spoke in strange regional accents.
Near the end of the summer of 1943, Prokopi Skevis reappeared in Lia, thoroughly chastened by his exile in the Yannina valley. Eleni noticed that he seemed hardened, more distant from the local people and that he rarely spoke anymore about the common struggle of the Allies and andartes against the Germans. Instead, in his speeches he concentrated on denouncing “monarcho-fascists,” which meant Zervas; imperialists, which meant admirers of the king, like her father; and bloodsucking exploiters of the masses. As a reward for his new ideological orthodoxy, Prokopi was named secretary of the Communist Party committee for the entire prefecture of Thesprotia. Most of the Liotes were glad to see the local resistance founder back and took pride in the promotion of their native son in ELAS’ ranks.
The endless warring of ELAS and EDES guerrillas had hamstrung the whole resistance effort so much that in July, under prodding from the British Military Mission, an agreement was negotiated between the guerrilla groups to cease hostilities against one another and put themselves under the orders of a joint general headquarters based in Pertouli, Thessaly, made up of representatives from each resistance band and the British commandos.
In the Mourgana area, EDES was well dug in at Keramitsa, and ELAS had a firm hold on the upper villages: Lia, Babouri and Tsamanta.
Hoping to keep the two sides from erupting into battle with each other and to make them concentrate on the real enemy—the Germans—the British Military Mission to Greece decided to send representatives to the Mourgana mountains, which were assuming increasing strategic importance. In case of an Allied invasion on the Greek west coast, opposite Corfu, a strong resistance army in the Mourgana could block the route of German reinforcements to the landing site both from Albania in the north and Yannina in the east. The region also contained one of the two evacuation routes the Germans could take out of Greece—through Albania to the Adriatic Sea. The Germans preferred this route because it avoided going through Tito’s strong partisan army in Yugoslavia, and the Allies wanted it closed.
The British Empire arrived in Lia in the unlikely person of a tall, nervous, fair-haired Scot of about thirty-five named Lieutenant John Anderson. The villagers soon came to call him “Captain Ian.” He was accompanied by another subject of His Majesty, Corporal Kenneth Smith, a large, lusty, dark-haired Geordie from the north of England with a wireless radio on his back. Most extraordinary of all was their interpreter, a shy, coffee-colored man named Peter Saramantis, who had a Greek sailor for a father and a black South African for a mother. He told the villagers that the British were setting up an Allied mission right in Lia and that they had rented the two-room Fafoutis house in back of the police station for the purpose.
Nearly everyone in the village felt proud and a little more secure with the arrival of British commandos in their midst. There was no way to foresee that the British presence would heighten the tensions between ELAS and EDES and bring civil war right to their doorsteps.
On September 9, 1943, Italy capitulated to the Allies. Its surrender destroyed the tenuous equilibrium which the British had been trying so hard to maintain between the Greek resistance groups.
The 100,000 Italian soldiers in Greece were suddenly faced with the dilemma of giving themselves up to the Germans or to the andartes. Their morale broken, most surrendered to whichever side reached them first. On the island of Rhodes, 40,000 Italian soldiers surrendered to only 5,000 Germans.
When the Nazis in other parts of Greece encountered resistance from their former allies, they were merciless. In Cephalonia some Italian soldiers tried to defend themselves and the German commandant told his men, “Hunters! The next twenty-four are yours!” Overnight, 4,000 Italians were shot.
The Germans and the guerrilla resistance groups throughout Greece raced one another to capture the precious Italian weapons. The plum was the Italian Pinerolo Division in central Thessaly, led by General Alberto Infante, which controlled about 12,000 men and all their arms.
ELAS was the predominant guerrilla group in that area. Knowing that the andartes were nearly as dangerous as the Germans, Infante contacted the British and asked them to oversee his surrender to the guerrilla leaders. At the same moment the Germans were rushing a convoy of armored units and an SS regiment toward the spot to prevent such a prize from falling into ELAS hands.
The chief of the British mission knew that Infante’s thousands of weapons would give ELAS such an advantage that it would threaten the fragile truce with the other resistance groups, but there was nothing he could do. He nervously initialed the treaty signed by Infante and Kapetan Aris of ELAS. As soon as they surrendered, the Italians joined the ELAS guerrillas in fighting off the German onslaught.
To render the Italians powerless, ELAS divided them into small detachments, sent them to separate localities, then disarmed and dispatched them to work camps in the mountains, where about 1,000 died that winter.
The sudden windfall of Italian weapons—10,000 rifles, 20 pieces of artillery, 2 armored cars, 100 trucks and more than 50 smaller vehicles—made ELAS so superior to EDES in firepower that it began to seem inevitable they would attack EDES, setting off a civil war.
General Infante and his staff were taken for their protection to the headquarters of the British commandos that had been established at Pertouli, Thessaly, where British officers began making plans to spirit them out of Greece. Infante would be evacuated overland to Albania and the sea, where a submarine would carry him to Italy. The evacuation of Infante was assigned to a new Allied commando post which had just been set up by the British near the Albanian border in the village of Lia.
JUST AS THE ELAS skits had enlivened the tedium of life in Lia, the establishment of a British commando post there provided an exciting diversion for the villagers.
No foreigner had ever lived among them, and the peasants studied these three Englishmen as if they were rare and fascinating zoological specimens. It was hard to believe that the mighty British Empire, which the Greeks had long held in awe, would manifest itself in the persons of the tall, nervous Scottish captain, the husky, loud-voiced radio operator and the mulatto interpreter. They had many peccadilloes. For one thing, they wore short pants like children. They also ran up and down the mountain paths for exercise. The first time that happened, all the villagers who saw them took to their heels running in the same direction, certain that the Germans were in hot pursuit. They were astonished to learn that the English were running for recreation. The villagers associated the mountainsides with toil and fatigue and would no more walk or run about for amusement than fishermen would relax by swimming in the sea.
Nevertheless, however strange the habits of the English, the Liotes considered it an honor to have them there and shouted “Long live England!” when they passed the officers and pressed gifts of fruit and vegetables into their hands. Dimitri Stratis, a second cousin of Eleni Gatzoyiannis, told her that by their patronage, the British had saved his cafenion near their headquarters. He had been about to close down for lack of goods to sell when the Scot offered to pay him gold sovereigns to get Italian beer on the Albanian black market, along with such luxuries as marmalade and candles. Captain Ian, confided Dimitri, drank a prodigious amount of beer.
From another distant cousin—Nikola Paroussis in Babouri—a young guerrilla who happened to be in charge of the makeshift landing field on the night of September 17, Eleni learned how the last mem
ber of the mission, a dashing young captain named Philip Nind, was dropped from an airplane near the monastery of St. Athanassios along with twenty-four parachutes bearing boxes of supplies. Paroussis had tracked down four boxes that got lost in the bushes and carried them up to the British headquarters, hoping to be rewarded with a new pair of boots at least. “But as you can see, I’m still wearing sandals,” he told Eleni ruefully. His only reward was a strange English phrase: “Thank you.”
The villagers watched with interest as the British set up housekeeping. The officers hired a cook from the village of Faneromeri, nicknamed him “Henry” and installed him in the separate shack which served as a kitchen. They used one room of the Fafoutis house for a bedroom and the other for the wireless radio. They bought a mule and christened it “Edda,” for Mussolini’s daughter. It was even rumored that they pinned pictures of naked women to the walls of their bedroom.
Father Zisis was as eager as everyone else to welcome the English and offered his services, but he was stumped by the assignment they gave him: to find two village women to be their housekeepers. No respectable village women would work in the British mission, the priest knew. Women did not go into the living quarters of nonrelatives without tarnishing their reputation beyond repair, but it was impossible to make the British understand this. After all, they were offering to pay the housekeepers each a British gold sovereign a month, plus their meals during working hours. Finally Father Zisis thought of the two surviving daughters of the widow Botsaris, with their bobbed hair and Athenian manners. They brazenly greeted village men whom they passed on the road. They desperately needed money for food, and their mother was too distracted by grief over her dead children to interfere.
That was how Angeliki Botsaris and her sister Constantina became housekeepers for the English mission in Lia, which had been grandly named the Bovington Mission by Allied Headquarters in Cairo. Because Angeliki was a neighbor of the Gatzoyiannis family, she would often drop by Eleni’s house for a visit and relate the mysterious activities going on there. She described the English officers’ strange eating habits; instead of fresh food they preferred powdered eggs, canned meat and something called cocoa, and refused to put olive oil on their salad, saying it was only fit for fueling lamps. But they were almost excessively clean and disconcertingly polite to their housekeepers despite the language barrier.
Eleni Page 13
