Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  By the time the four reached the outskirts of Lia, it was already afternoon. They were among the first to return to the burned-out village. The hallucinatory feeling of seeing something so familiar completely changed increased as they walked on. A few old women scratched about in the smoking ashes of what had been their homes, occasionally digging up a usable object and putting it aside. The Haidis house was almost the last on the western edge of Lia, and they approached it with dread. Because the path wound around the mountain at a point several yards above the roof level of Kitso’s house, they could see from a distance that only the wall which divided his half from that of Anastasia Haidis was still standing. Eleni started to cry as soon as she saw the burned-out shell, but Kitso ashamed of his previous weakness, steeled himself to look at it without emotion. On the day the house was completed in 1895 and the cornerstone put in place, Kitso was fifteen years old. His father had built it as a monument to the Haidis family just as a church is a tribute in stone to the saint whose name it bears.

  Kitso and his two brothers had loaded the gray-pink granite for the walls from high on the mountain onto the mules and carried the dark gray sheets of slate for the roof from the lowland riverbanks on their own backs. The women of the family whitewashed the inner walls with lime and the most skilled stone carver was hired to cut the two-headed eagles, the cypresses and rosettes on the four faces of the fireplaces. The hyacinths on the wooden rosetta in the center of the ceiling and the acantha leaves on the cornices were done by wood-carvers from Metsovo. A veranda draped with grape vines stretched around three sides of the house and in its shade Kitso had watched nearly every sunset of his life.

  When he became its master after his father’s death, Kitso always celebrated the house’s nameday—St. Athanassios—with even more splendor than his own. He brought his bride to its door, and in its good chamber he put four infant daughters in their coffins. Kitso took more pride in that house than in any mill he ever built, and now it was gone. Every room had been fragrant with memories, just as the holy water and sweet basil scattered by the priest scented each corner on the day it was consecrated.

  Kitso knew, as he looked at the ashes of his father’s dream, that eventually he would build another house, but he promised himself never to build one that could leave such a wound on his heart.

  Eleni wiped her tears away with her apron and tied the mule at the gate to the courtyard. She told Kanta to sit at the threshold of the gate and not to come any closer, while the others examined the wreckage.

  Kanta was tired from the long walk but much less upset than the adults at the loss of her grandfather’s house and belongings. After all, their own house was intact—they had seen that from the ridge of St. Marina. As she sat and watched the shadows lengthen, Kanta heard what sounded like Anastasia Haidis’ voice, raised in the shrill ululating village cry, calling the name of her small grandson from somewhere down the hill: “Ooohhh, Fotooouu!” After a while Eleni returned to where Kanta was sitting and said that no one could find Anastasia, only the bullet-riddled carcass of one of her goats halfway up the ravine, the solitary victim of the ELAS guerrillas’ ill-advised fire on the Germans.

  “She’s down there somewhere,” said Kanta, pointing. “I heard her calling Fotis.”

  Andreas went down the ravine to hunt for the old woman. Eleni looked to see if she was at the Petsis house next door, but found it, too, in ashes. Kanta stayed where she was, feeling uneasy as the light faded. She heard the tapping of a cane and slow, shuffling steps coming down the hill just in front of her. Soon the bent figure of the blind woman, Sophia Karapanou, came into view.

  “Over here, Yiayia!” called Kanta, and the woman turned chalky blue eyes, clouded with cataracts, in her direction. She tottered over and put her hand on Kanta’s head, then carefully sat down on the stone beside her.

  “Everybody’s looking for Yiayia Anastasia,” said Kanta. “I heard her calling from down in the ravine.”

  “She’s not in the ravine, she’s in the house,” replied the old woman.

  “But the house is gone,” Kanta explained patiently to the blind woman. “The Germans burned it, and half the village, and the school and the Church of the Virgin too!”

  “I know,” Sophia replied. “They burned Anastasia too. They threw her into the house. Name of God, how she screamed!”

  Kanta felt sick. “But I heard her just now! I heard her voice.”

  “You may well have heard her, but that was her soul calling,” the old woman went on. “She’s not at peace, the way she died. She’s a vampire wandering. You need to get her a priest.”

  Kanta did not budge, but when her mother and grandfather returned, she told them what the blind woman had said. They turned toward the ruins of the house, but it was still smoking and darkness was setting in.

  In the twilight the rest of their group arrived with the animals. Megali nearly fell off the donkey when she saw what was left of her house. They had to carry her, weeping and invoking the saints, up the hill to Eleni’s house.

  It seemed incredible to find their own house unchanged after all that had happened. Eleni went immediately to the hollow oak in the backyard and found her treasures still inside. The goats bleated with joy at seeing their usual quarters. Megali was laid gently on a pile of velenzes near the fireplace and eventually fell asleep, but Kitso refused to come in. No one knew where he spent the night.

  The next morning the boy Fotis Haidis returned from the Agora with his mother and joined in the search for his grandmother. It was Fotis who spied a gold signet ring shining from beneath a pile of fallen rocks in the still-smoking cellar. In the ring was a bone.

  They lifted the rocks, blistering their hands, and found more bones and the silver cross she had always worn. Some of her hair still clung to the back of her skull. Someone found a piece of cloth and they gathered the bits of bone and teeth in it. As they worked, the women began to wail the death songs, and the keening sound brought neighbors, who joined in, pouring out their grief for their burned houses along with the lament for old Anastasia, who was not allowed to die as befitted her years.

  The funeral procession began to wind up the path toward the Church of St. Demetrios. They passed Sophia, who stood at her gate with a look of contentment on her blind face and made the sign of the cross as they passed. Soon her friend would be at peace.

  Outside St. Demetrios the mourners encountered a handful of andartes, including Spiro Skevis and Mitsi Bollis, descending from the mountaintops. The guerrillas stopped at the sight of the funeral procession, but the mourners stopped too, facing them. None of the villagers spoke, but their eyes eloquently laid the blame for the death of four innocents at their feet.

  “Well, we scared them away, didn’t we?” blurted Mitsi Bollis in the tense silence.

  No one answered.

  Eight days later Tassina returned to Lia on a mule, carrying her new son, who would be christened Haralambos. His birth had begun with Anastasia’s death cry. Eleni learned how he was born in the little room near Kostana without even clean rags to swaddle him, but the child was healthy and would live. Eleni believed that his birth on the day the village burned must be a sign from God that a new beginning would rise from the ashes.

  The Germans had come, and despite the tragedies, her family had survived. Every scrap of news from the outside world said that Hitler’s troops were being defeated. The rumors were that he would soon pull his divisions out of Greece.

  Eleni longed for the war to end so that they could start rebuilding their lives. But the andartes who had become as omnipresent as swallows in the village were also talking about a new beginning. The way they whispered about a “second round” made her fear that they were preparing not for peace but for more war.

  By the autumn of 1944, the end was clear. The Germans had lost Italy and Rumania as allies, and when even Turkey severed its ties with the Third Reich, Hitler’s forces in Greece began to withdraw. The last disheartened Germans limped out of Athens on Oc
tober 12, the same day British forces landed in Piraeus, expecting to find Athens a scorched shell. Instead they found the city intact, the population emaciated but exultant. “For three days and nights,” said an observer, “hungry, sick people spitting blood marched without sleeping, kept going by a collective delirium, the joy of new-found freedom.”

  The withdrawal of the Germans left the Communist-controlled ELAS the most powerful military force in the country. In late September its chief kapetanios, the black-bearded Aris Velouchiotis, was sent to secure the Peloponnesian peninsula by wiping out the last remnants of the Security Battalions appointed by the collaborationist government. With his hand-picked personal guard (the “Black Bonnets,” in their black sheepskin caps), Aris launched unprecedented massacres throughout Peloponnesos to terrorize the population into total submission to ELAS. On September 12 they executed 1,450 men, women and children in the town of Meligalas and threw them all in a well.

  The British arrived to find ELAS in control of all Greece except for a corner of Epiros held by EDES under Napoleon Zervas. With almost the entire country in their grip, the ELAS fighters were furious that the previous spring their leaders had signed an agreement in Lebanon with the ministers of the exiled King George II, giving ELAS only four seats in the Parliament that would now rule Greece.

  Convinced that they had been cheated of their rightful victory, ELAS troops decided to stage a coup. On the night of December 3, 1944, they attacked British and Greek troops in Athens, following a demonstration in which ELAS supporters were fired on by police, and according to various accounts, seven to twenty-eight were killed. At the height of the battle, ELAS had its enemies pinned into a few pockets near the city center. Throughout Athens the Communist Party’s secret police, OPLA, fanned out, knocking on doors, executing thousands of real and imaginary enemies of the party. By Christmas Day, OPLA had executed 13,500 Greeks, in three weeks eliminating twice as many of their own countrymen as the number of Germans killed in Greece during three years of occupation.

  The ELAS leaders made an even more serious blunder than the Lebanon agreement when they decided to send their best divisions not to join the battle of Athens but to launch a simultaneous attack on the army of Napoleon Zervas in Epiros. While they succeeded in driving Zervas off the mainland to the island of Corfu, the British, sent to Athens to prevent a Communist takeover of the country, inspired by a surprise Christmas Day visit by Winston Churchill, beat back ELAS and won control of the city.

  Humbled, the defeated Communist Party signed an agreement in Varkiza, a suburb of Athens, on February 12, 1945, that would disarm ELAS in exchange for being allowed to remain a legal political entity in Greece.

  In the four months of bloody civil war, 25,000 Greeks perished, joining the half million who had died during the occupation. But the deaths counted for nothing. Four months earlier, during a meeting in Moscow on October 9, 1944, between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the two men had already divided up the Balkans. “How would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Rumania, for us to have 90 percent of the say in Greece, and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?” Churchill asked Stalin, pushing the paper on which he had written the figures toward the Soviet leader. Stalin “took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it,” Churchill wrote later, “and the post-war fate of millions was sealed.”

  AT THE BEGINNING OF 1945 when the Communist-dominated ELAS guerrillas drove the EDES forces of Napoleon Zervas into the sea, the rising sun of ELAS seemed to have finally dawned on the new tomorrow that Prokopi Skevis had promised so often. But the Varkiza agreement of February 12 burst that sun like a helium balloon and sent the ELAS guerrillas limping home to their villages, stripped of their weapons, which they were required to surrender.

  If the Varkiza agreement meant defeat and betrayal to the ELAS fighters, to the villagers like Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her family it meant the end of war and the beginning of a period of hope. For the first time in four years they could pick up the pieces of their lives, plant the fields and wait for letters from the outside world.

  With Athens no longer embroiled in civil war, Eleni knew the mails would soon begin functioning, bringing envelopes from America filled with news of Christos, money to buy much-needed seed for the spring planting, and perhaps before long, the precious papers that would allow them to emigrate to America. Although their stomachs were still empty, they could feed on dreams.

  “All the people are fat in America,” Eleni would say in her storytelling voice. “Everyone has shoes. Every time you buy something, they give you a free paper bag to carry it home in. There are machines to do everything, even machines to eat up the dirt in the house. Hot and cold water comes out of a pipe instead of carrying it from a spring. There are toilets right inside the house, washed clean by running water like a waterfall. People can take a bath every day if they want to.” The children would hang on her words, making her tell every detail over and over.

  Olga was now seventeen, and Eleni saw how the village women had begun paying visits to the house, measuring the girl with appraising eyes as a potential daughter-in-law. As soon as the mails opened up, there would be enough money to buy Olga a dowry as grand as the daydreams she was always spinning.

  Every day Eleni found an excuse to walk to the Alonia, to ask the coffeehouse owner Spiro Michopoulos if by chance the postman had left a letter for her from America. The whole village was suffused with a new energy as they prepared for the first planting in four years that they could harvest without fear of the Germans confiscating their crops and burning their homes.

  Only in the houses of the half-dozen ELAS stalwarts was the prospect of spring a bitter one. Prokopi Skevis was inconsolable. “If we’d concentrated all our strength in Athens instead of wasting three divisions on Zervas, the British couldn’t have held out and today we’d be running the country instead of the puppets who spent the war sunbathing in Cairo!” he mourned. The Skevis brothers both agreed, however, that the important thing was for the Communist Party to survive despite its mistakes, even if it meant destroying ELAS to do it. Although unarmed, they still had an important role in the struggle. When the ELAS regiments were dispersed, their officers ordered them to go back to their villages and maintain a tight grip on the loyalty of the inhabitants.

  To that end, Spiro Skevis organized all the adolescent boys and young men of Lia into a theatrical troupe. They performed an instructive skit entitled “Homes in Ruins,” a dramatic melodrama about a brave ELAS andarte who returns after the war to find his house burned and his starving sister preyed upon by an evil-minded black marketeer. Most of the food and supplies available in Greece after the war had found their way into the thriving black market, to be sold at exorbitant prices, and the sneering, capitalist black marketeer, played by Christos Bartozokis with a penciledon mustache, was a natural villain.

  The unfortunate girl was played by Yianni Kepas, an ideal choice, Spiro thought. Of course, no respectable maiden would be allowed to act in a public skit or even sit in the audience, so Yianni, who was a handsome, fair-haired young fellow, floured his face for the play to hide his stubble, tied a scarf around his head and wore a dress with an embroidered apron. In all, there were seventeen men and boys in the cast. They rehearsed for a month, built a small raised stage in the village square, and brought benches out of the half-burned schoolhouse to make a horseshoe of seats for the audience.

  The drama, performed on a Sunday afternoon before a crowd that overflowed the square, lasted for two hours, climaxing in the bloody killing of the black marketeer by the wronged maiden. The audience sat spellbound until the part where the villain placed his hands on the breasts of the weeping girl and demanded that she pay for food in a coin dearer than gold. In the hush, a voice could be heard from the back of the crowd, saying in a stage whisper, “Kepas looks so pretty in a dress, he’d better watch out they don’t send him off to Aris!”

  The audience froze, and the “leading lady” forgot his lines at this outrage. EDES fo
rces had widely circulated rumors that Aris, the revered ELAS hero, was a pederast. All eyes, including those of the actors, moved to the Skevis brothers in the front row. Spiro, the author of the play, turned to survey the men at the back, who returned his stare innocently. When the silence became oppressive, Spiro turned back to the stage and nodded to the performers. Kepas managed to recall his next line and the end of the play was greeted with a thunderous applause.

  After it died away, Spiro got up and elaborated on the moral. “Under our brave leaders, including Kapetan Aris,” he began with pointed emphasis, “we drove the German invaders out of our beloved country. Now some false friends are trying to bring back the capitalist bloodsuckers and the cowardly Glücksburg king. As this play shows us, these forces will exploit, torment and humiliate all of us and”—he paused and scanned the crowd—“they have lackeys even in this village! But if we stand united behind the Communist Party of Greece, the party of the poor and oppressed, we will triumph!”

  Someone in the audience interrupted. He sounded more respectful than the heckler who had mentioned Aris. “Everyone has heard of the courage your men showed, Comrade Spiro,” Kitso Haidis said. “When the Germans came here, you challenged their whole battalion with only six men and one machine gun from atop the Prophet Elias. But I have one question: When you provoked the Germans enough to burn down half our village, couldn’t you at least have hit a German ass instead of poor old Anastasia’s goat?”

  There were several involuntary snorts of laughter and the crowd turned back to Spiro, whose face was the color of his shirt. Before his brother could react, Prokopi stepped up from the front row. “You were lucky one time, old man!” Prokopi snapped. “Don’t think you’re going to be lucky next time!”