Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  The commandant was a large, florid man who showed Katina photographs of his children and complimented her on the local cheese.

  It was late afternoon when the Germans made ready to leave. The commandant thanked Katina for the village’s hospitality and added, “You see, if we are not provoked, it is not necessary to fear us.”

  Then the battalion marched through the village moving toward Lia while hidden eyes followed them from behind every shuttered window. When they were gone the villagers crowded around the exhausted Katina to congratulate her. They had escaped Armageddon thanks to some tsipouro and a middle-aged schoolmistress who knew a little German.

  Half an hour later the euphoria dissolved with the news that the Germans were not quite gone. They had camped for the night halfway between Babouri and Lia, only ten minutes outside of the village.

  That night a fine rain fell on the Germans in their tents outside Lia and on the Gatzoyiannis family huddled in the field by St. Marina. Eleni held Nikola and Fotini in her lap with an oilcloth draped over the three of them. The rainwater ran down her arms and the children’s bare legs.

  The sun rose on mountains washed as clean as on the day of creation. The Germans awoke damp and irritable, looking down on foothills still hidden in morning mist. The commandant ordered an early start. He knew from his intelligence reports that just ahead was the home of the Skevis brothers, in a village so strongly sympathetic to ELAS that it was called “Little Moscow.” He was expecting trouble.

  As the battalion rounded the last bend in the path to Lia, they saw the gray slate roofs of the village spread before them, touched by the first fingers of light. The heathery green of the mountainside was punctuated with puffs of golden broom and mauve Judas trees. Over it all glowered a sky heavy with rainclouds. It was the same supernatural light once painted by a man from Crete called El Greco, but the Germans were not admiring the view.

  Near the western edge of the village Anastasia Haidis had risen early and left the house to take a covered copper pot of stew up the mountain to the blind woman, Sophia Karapanou.

  The German battalion marched into the village, past the deserted Petsis house, and was just abreast of the double Haidis house when the morning hush was punctuated by the sound of machine-gun fire spattering from the heights of Prophet Elias, too far away to do any damage, sending puffs of smoke drifting up into the sky.

  The German commandant shouted orders in a voice full of excitement. Perhaps the guerrillas were trying to lure them into the crags and hollows in order to have the advantage, but they would soon learn the price of their arrogance. Within moments, the Germans assembled half a dozen machine guns and an equal number of mortars, all trained toward Prophet Elias. Suddenly the whole side of the mountain below the chapel began to erupt as the Germans strafed it from bottom to top. Soon the slope was black and smoking.

  The commandant ordered the firing to stop. Any andartes still on the mountainside must have been hit or driven off. Now it was time to punish the people who had sheltered them.

  “Burn the village,” he ordered.

  • • •

  The moment the German fusillade ceased, Anastasia Haidis ran out of the blind woman’s house. She looked down and saw a thin wisp of smoke rising above the screen of cypress trees. “They’re burning my house!” she gasped. “My God, the goats are in the cellar!”

  Sophia reached out sightlessly to hold her back, but Anastasia was already stumbling down the path, her hands waving at the unseen enemy. A knot of German soldiers watched her descending upon them like a shrieking raven. “Have mercy on my house, spare my goats!” she screamed, making the Chams smile. She threw herself against the door to the cellar, where the three goats could be heard bleating. One of the Chams came forward to pull her back. “Get away, old woman, or we’ll let you roast along with your goats!” he said.

  As she watched the flames devour the house where she had lived since she was a bride of fourteen, Anastasia crumpled and they let her fall. Then, suddenly, she was on her feet, flying toward the door once more. As they dragged her back again, Anastasia’s screams rose over the roar of the fire and could be heard by Tassina Bartzokis all the way down to Kostana. The air carried the cries like disembodied spirits: “Children, where are you? Save me!” Above in the Perivoli, Sophia sat waiting in her own house, listening with the preternatural hearing of the blind to every moan that Anastasia uttered.

  Drawn by the commotion, the commandant approached. He had just completed a tour of the village and was pleased with the progress. The school building and most of the houses were in flames. He looked down with satisfaction at the lower village and its centerpiece, the Church of the Virgin.

  If the cafenion is the heart of a Greek village, the largest church is its soul. For seven centuries the Church of the Virgin had nourished the souls of the Liotes. Its interior was their pride and their Bible. No one needed to be literate to know the Holy Scriptures, for they were all illustrated here in the frescoes painted by the hand of monks long vanished into anonymity. In the soaring vault of the cupola, Christ the All-Powerful, thirty times the size of a mortal man, scrutinized the congregation below, his Gospel clasped in his hand. In the spaces between the windows, the prophets and apostles, painted full-length with bristling beards and mournful eyes, made their eternal parade toward the altar.

  The villagers of Lia never tired of staring at the wonders of the Church of the Virgin: the walls glowed with every saint and martyr, the twelve feast days, the Last Supper, the life of the Virgin, and as a final warning, on the wall near the door, the Last Judgment, where bizarre dragons and devils punished every sort of evil, with the priests in the front rank of the sinners.

  The jewel of the church was the magnificent golden carved iconostasis, the shimmering screen which hid the mysteries of the sanctuary until the priest emerged from the Royal Doors carrying the blood and body of Christ. The iconostasis held four tiers of icons, splendid with gold leaf and jewels, and between the sacred pictures the native wood-carvers had allowed their imagination to create a fantasy of twining vines and mythical birds and beasts perched in the lacy fretwork.

  The most sacred object in the church was the silken antimin on the altar table, with the death of Christ embroidered on it and the bone of a saint sewn into its lining. It was this cloth which the Chams set alight. Thanks to the kerosene they spilled, the flames climbed swiftly to the top tier of the iconostasis, making the sinuous vines and animals come alive. The flickering light was reflected in the saints’ eyes and on the face of the Pantocrator, but the only living witness to the magnificent final spectacle was the German commandant.

  Convinced that the church would burn nicely, he set out toward the starting point of his promenade, where he found a number of his men gathered around an old woman in black who was struggling in the grasp of two Chams.

  The commandant had decided not to send his men into the upper village for fear partisans were still hiding there and he had satisfied himself that all of the middle and lower village was burning. But he felt disappointed that no prisoner had been taken from this serpents’ nest of rebels whom he could use as an example.

  The two Chams were getting tired of holding Anastasia as she flapped and screeched. For the onlookers the joke had lost its interest. The Chams glanced at the commandant and he gave a small nod. They picked up the old woman like a doll and tossed her through one of the now empty windows. The floor was gone and she fell directly into the flames of the cellar as a long wordless scream came from her mouth that raised the hairs on the arms of the listeners in Kostana. Tassina heard it and felt an answering pain start at her sides and travel toward the center of her abdomen. She realized that her time had come early, and felt warm liquid flowing down her legs.

  The commandant ordered his men to assemble. There was nothing more to be accomplished here. They marched through the village and left, heading southeast toward the rise of St. Marina, where the Gatzoyiannis family was hiding.

 
On the far side of the ridge dedicated to Marina, the martyred saint of the grape harvest, the Gatzoyiannis family watched their sheep and goats graze while Fotini and Nikola played in the dry riverbed. They were too far away to hear Anastasia Haidis’ screams, but the barrage of German gunfire shocked them into a fearful silence. They sat, scarcely daring to move, waiting.

  After a few minutes there was an exclamation from Nitsa, and everyone looked into the sky where a delicate finger of smoke was rising. “They’re burning the village!” Megali blurted out. She began to cry and Eleni put her arms around her.

  “I’m going to the top of St. Marina to see what’s happening,” said Kitso Haidis.

  “I’m going with you, Father,” Eleni said quickly. At once Glykeria and Kanta begged to go too.

  Reluctantly Eleni said that Kanta could come if she stayed behind her, ready to run. To ten-year-old Glykeria she said, “You know you’re as slow as a tortoise! You’d get us all caught.”

  Andreas, afraid to stay, afraid to go, finally decided they needed his military expertise to assess the situation properly. After warning Megali, Nitsa and Olga to stay close to the little ones and keep the animals quiet, Eleni, Kitso, Andreas and Kanta climbed out of the sandy riverbed up the rise toward St. Marina.

  On the other side the German battalion approached from the direction of Lia. Scouts were running ahead, searching every gully for signs of partisans. Just as the main body was coming down out of the mountains near a spot called the Little Springs, an advance patrol surprised two young men from Lia. They were part of a group who had concealed themselves in the foothills, but these two men, Gregori Lollis and Vasili Stoungas, were caught as they were leading nearly forty sheep and goats up a hill to graze. The advance patrol brought them at gunpoint to the commandant. At almost the same moment another patrol arrived, dragging a middle-aged tinker, Yiorgi Billis, who had walked right into them. He was indignantly waving a pass stamped by the German authority in Yannina. The Chams translated his protests, but the German officer listened without interest.

  The three men couldn’t keep their eyes off the sight high above them of their village in flames. The commandant told them through an interpreter that he was going to ask them one question; their survival would depend on how they answered it. Were there any partisans hiding in the foothills around them? The captives looked at one another, then in unison began making vigorous gestures of denial. “All the partisans are up in the mountains,” said Gregori Lollis.

  The Germans let the man with the pass go, but the commandant decided to take Lollis and Stoungas as far as the next village, Kostana, to check their identities. Their hands were tied behind them and they were pushed along the road at the head of the batallion, their flocks left behind.

  Yiorgi Billis, the tinker with the pass from Yannina, was still in sight, walking quickly away, when a sound came from the foothills that froze everyone in mid-step—the pop of two faraway rifle shots. The Germans took cover on either side of the road. The commandant snapped an order and several Chams ran after Yiorgi Billis, who was standing in a daze, looking from the Germans behind him to the spot where he had seen puffs of smoke. By the time he started to run, they were on top of him.

  Two ELAS guerrillas from the Skevis group had impetuously fired the shots that would cost the lives of three of their fellow villagers. At the first shot a shepherd who was hiding below them and could see what they could not, shouted, “Hold your fire, boys! They have hostages!” But it was too late.

  The tinker, Yiorgi Billis, was dragged back to where the other two captives stood. He screamed that he was innocent, he had been away for six months; how could he know there were partisans in the foothills? He didn’t stop screaming until the German commandant slapped him.

  Out of rifle range of the hidden partisans, the Germans continued on their way, pushing the captives ahead of them. The commandant had three more Liotes to make an example of, and he intended to execute them in the churchyard at Kostana with every person in the village watching.

  Eleni, Kitso, Andreas and Kanta, who were halfway up the other side of the ridge, stopped and looked at one another when they heard the andartes’ two rifle shots.

  “Why are they shooting?” asked Kitso. “They sound far away.”

  Andreas was visibly trembling. “It’s a bad sign,” he said. “They’re withdrawing this way. We’ve got to go back!”

  “Let’s just go high enough to see what’s on fire in the village,” said Eleni.

  Andreas’ legs wouldn’t move and his shirt was drenched with sweat. He felt just as he had in 1921 in Turkey when the Greek soldiers threw down their guns and fled into the swamps.

  “You do what you want,” he shouted at the others. “I’m going back!” He turned and stalked down the incline toward the camp, trying not to run.

  Eleni took Kanta’s hand and continued slowly up the ridge to the point where the mountainside, with Lia huddled in the large cleft, came slowly into view. She stopped, horrified. The whole lower half of the village was obscured by smoke, and the Church of the Virgin was a torch.

  Her father came abreast of her, squinting into the distance; then his eyes picked out the gaping hole that had been his house, and with a cry he fell to his knees. Great, painful sobs exploded from him and like some rabid animal he dug in the dirt with his hands. Kanta was more frightened by her grandfather’s behavior than the sight of the burning village. His loss of control terrified her, and she ran up the hill to get away from the sound of his grief. When she arrived at the top of the ridge, the girl looked down and suddenly clapped her hands over her mouth. Eleni hurried to her side.

  Below them were more Germans than Kanta thought the world contained; their helmets and gun barrels reflecting the sunlight so that her eyes watered, a river of marching men flowing straight toward her. She stared, paralyzed, until her mother wrenched her by the shoulder and pulled her flat on the ground.

  At the sight of the German army Kitso turned and waved frantically at Andreas, who stood watching from the bottom of the ridge. The old man began to run down so fast that his feet slipped out from under him and he rolled to the bottom of the hill. Andreas needed only a glimpse of Kitso’s frantic retreat to know that his worst fears had come true—the Germans were upon them. He took off like a mountain goat, shouting, as he crashed through the group in the riverbed, “The Germans are behind me!” Hardly slowing his pace, he scooped Nikola up from his sand castles and continued running.

  Olga dropped the spoon she was using to stir the rice pudding and pulled Fotini in the same direction. Glykeria ran after Andreas too. Megali and Nitsa had become so frantic they were going in circles, gathering up blankets and then dropping them.

  Everyone followed Andreas toward a wooded area, not realizing it took them closer to Kostana. He finally stopped among the trees near a large boulder and the girls collapsed beside him. As Megali puffed up, holding her blankets, Olga found her voice: “What did you see, Uncle? Where are the rest?”

  “The Germans were close enough to bite us!” he panted. “Your mother and grandfather deserve what happens to them for going up that rise.”

  The girls and Nikola started to cry, and the sound attracted the missing members of the family, who were searching for them. The food and the animals had been left behind at the dry riverbed, but the family huddled together under the boulder like hens hiding from the shadow of the hawk.

  Kanta described the huge army of Germans over and over again, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. When she stopped, Eleni said quietly to her father, “Did you see that they had captured three men? I recognized Gregori Lollis and the Stoungas boy.” Kitso bit his lower lip and shook his head in a gesture that meant there was no hope for them. Eleni thought of Gregori’s pregnant wife and wondered if she knew her husband had been taken by the Germans.

  No one spoke of the burned village, but Megali wept all night, a nasal drone. Kitso didn’t even bother to make her stop. He seemed far away in his th
oughts. The children cried too because they were cold and hungry, but they huddled together for warmth and eventually slept.

  Sometime in the night I awoke, feeling the warmth of my mother’s side against my cheek. It was the beginning of an earthquake that had roused me, a rhythmic trembling of the earth. It formed itself into the sound of marching feet. The Germans were passing so close to us that if I opened my eyelids a crack I could see the shapes of their boots. There were guttural shouts in a language I couldn’t understand. Although I didn’t know it then, they were on their way from Kostana, heading southeast toward Igoumenitsa, having finished with the executions of their hostages.

  I felt my mother’s hand tight over my mouth, but it wasn’t necessary; I didn’t have the strength to move or make a sound. I could feel the shuddering of her body and the thud of her heartbeat, as quick as my own. Automatically, to make the fear go away and to protect us, I silently began to repeat the evening prayer that she had taught me, the four-line poem that every Greek child says before going to sleep: “I kneel and cross myself / Arms for battle at my side / God’s servant, they call me / And I fear nothing.”

  It didn’t work. I was so afraid I could taste it; a steely bitterness on my tongue. The thing that frightened me most was not the Germans, passing yards from where we were hidden, but the convulsive trembling of my mother. In the house at Kostana, she had laid my fears to rest with her calm decision to go about ordinary tasks as if things were indeed normal. But that night when the German army passed by, I discovered that there were things so powerful and so evil that even my mother couldn’t make them go away. She was as terrified as I was and there was nowhere to turn for protection. That night remains the most vivid memory of my early childhood.

  The next morning while everyone was still marveling at their hair’s-breadth escape from the Germans, Kitso Haidis could think of nothing but getting back to Lia. He was obsessed with seeing the ruins of his house. Eleni, Andreas and Kanta, the better walkers of the group, decided to go ahead with him, leaving the rest to gather the animals and herd them up the mountains.