Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  “Not quite,” he replied, preening a bit. “I’m working for the army on intelligence matters, as you may have heard, besides teaching in Yannina, and they sent me here on an inquiry. What brings you here?”

  She poured out what had happened to her dreams of emigrating to America, and Minas insisted on buying her a coffee at a nearby café. When she seemed calmer, he leaned forward and spoke quietly so as not to be overheard. “If you’re not emigrating, Eleni, I want you to take my advice and get yourself and the children out of Lia. The guerrillas have been moving closer to the Mourgana. It’s just a matter of time. And if you’re there when they come, it won’t go well with you. They’re killing police and rightists all over northern Greece.”

  “We’re a household of women and children,” she protested. “Why should they bother us? We’ve done nothing against them!” She didn’t mention that she had even hidden two ELAS andartes in her home.

  Minas raised a warning finger to his lips. “Sell your part of the store in Yannina that Christos and my father own together. Use the money to move your family to Yannina until the papers come through for America. My father’s been talking about selling anyway, so I know he wouldn’t object.”

  Eleni shook her head. “If I went to Yannina, a woman with four unmarried daughters and no husband, everybody would call us whores! We’ll put through our papers in the fall, and before then I’ll get Olga engaged to a boy from a good village family.”

  But Minas’ words had disturbed her, and when she got home, Eleni wrote an anxious letter to Christos, telling him to send more money for the notary as soon as he could, adding: “I ran into Minas Stratis in Filiates and he warned me that the Communists might come back to Lia. He said that we should get out before that happens, that I should take the family to Yannina, but I’m worried what people would say. What do you want me to do?”

  A month later, in June of 1947, she received Christos’ reply, a letter that became widely quoted in their neighborhood of the Perivoli. “You have no business going anywhere,” he wrote. “If they’re fighting at the spring right above the house, you stay in your home with your children. After all, who are these andartes? They’re Greeks, fellow villagers some of them, fighting for their rights. I have worked for my living all my life and never bothered anyone. Why should they bother my family?”

  In late June of 1947 my mother informed me that we were going to Babouri to say goodbye to my godmother, Eugenia Economou, who had finally obtained the immigration papers for herself and her son Stavros to join her husband Nassios in Worcester, Massachusetts. I could tell by the set of my mother’s jaw as we walked toward Babouri that the visit was going to be difficult for her. I wasn’t looking forward to it either.

  Nearly eight years old, I had become increasingly sensitive about being the son of an American. Since the passage of the Truman Doctrine several months before, the older boys of Lia had started taunting me for being the son of one of the foreign capitalists whose money was paying for guns that were being used against the brave partisans of ELAS. I was developing secret resentments against my father and wished that he would either bring us to America, like Stavros’ father, or come to live in Greece so that I wouldn’t have to put up with the scorn of the other boys.

  I had always been a little afraid of Stavros Economou, a strong, husky boy four years older than myself. Because he was the only son of Nassios Economou to survive infancy, Stavros was brought up by his doting mother to consider himself the crown prince of Babouri. None of the children in his village would dare to tease him about his American father. Furthermore, Stavros was lionized by the other children because he owned the only toys we had ever seen—wonderful American toys: a truck and an airplane that sped about the floor when you turned their keys, and a rainbow-colored spinning top. My father never sent anything as frivolous as toys, just practical things like clothes and shoes. I resented that too.

  When we arrived in Babouri, my godmother received us wearing a white wool European-style dress which was the talk of the village for its daring color and design. She dimpled and preened as she served us sweets and chattered about the house and furniture awaiting them in America. My mother’s polite good wishes sounded strained to me. I knew that it was agonizing to her that Eugenia was setting out on the journey to America while we were left behind in the increasingly hostile atmosphere of Lia.

  I found Stavros holding court outside his house. With princely noblesse oblige he had bequeathed the three famous toys to the daughter of the postmaster. They were old and boring, he said, all right for babies, but he had dozens of better toys waiting for him in America, including an electric-train set. He was wearing new American long trousers, like a man, not short pants like me. I hung back as I watched the children of Babouri dancing attendance on him.

  When the time came to leave, my mother called me inside to kiss my godmother goodbye. Eugenia put a white lace handkerchief in my hand—she had made it especially as a last gift to her godson, she said. I took it sullenly, wondering why she imagined I would want a handkerchief. Then she embraced my mother and they both began to cry, realizing they might never see each other again. My mother took hold of both Eugenia’s hands and said in an unsteady voice, “When you see Christos in America, tell him to hurry. Tell him that coming to join him is all we want in the world.”

  She abruptly seized my hand to lead me away, not wanting Eugenia to see how much her good fortune stung. When we were at the first bend in the road, we turned around and waved back at my godmother and Stavros. Then, when we were out of sight, my mother let herself cry openly. I felt like crying too. I had wanted Stavros at least to give me that airplane.

  In the heat of July, Eleni’s discontent grew apace with the fields of corn, and the end of the month brought a new and more serious quarrel with her father.

  One day a daughter of Foto Gatzoyiannis came by to see Eleni. She was married to Dimitri Stratis, proprietor of one of the coffeehouses, and brother of Minas and Vasili Stratis. She told Eleni that her father-in-law, who owned the store on a busy shopping street in Yannina in partnership with Christos, had sold his half to the tenant, who was paying only a tiny rent because of strict postwar rent-control laws. Eleni realized the sale made Christos’ share of the store nearly worthless because there would be no possibility of raising the rent with the tenant as co-owner, and no one else would want to buy into it either.

  Eleni suddenly remembered that Christos had left her father the power of attorney to look after his business interests. It had never occurred to her that Kitso might use the papers against them. She hurried to her father’s house, which he had rebuilt on the foundations of the burned one. He was breaking up slates with a sledgehammer to fix a leak on the roof, while the sweat drenched his shirt.

  Eleni blurted out what she had just heard—that Stratis had sold his share of Christos’ store to the tenant. Kitso continued swinging the hammer with vicious accuracy. “And what do you want me to do about it?” he asked. “Am I going to spend all my life handling your concerns?”

  Eleni felt sick at the unfairness of it all. Christos had left him in charge, she shouted. He should have looked after their interests. Now the store was worthless. Kitso stopped and wiped his face. “I looked after his wife and family through the whole war, and what did I get for it?” he asked. “Nothing. I don’t owe him a fucking thing! I told Stratis to go ahead and do what he wanted.”

  He turned back to splitting the stones and Eleni was reminded of the way he drove the hatchet into the skull of the Turkish brigand when she was a child.

  “I stayed behind after I was married because of you and Mother!” she nearly screamed, the words coming out in a rush. “I’ve raised my children here so you wouldn’t be alone. But I’m going to take them to America, where they belong, with their father. I’ll see that you get every sovereign of what you say we owe you. But one day you’ll wish you could see just the hem of my dress, and you’ll die alone with your gold!”

  Kitso
continued smashing the slates with grim ferocity, not looking up as she turned and ran away.

  This last and worst battle with her father shook Eleni’s equilibrium to its foundations. She forbade the children to visit their grandfather anymore, although Megali dropped by their house almost daily. Often at night the girls and Nikola would hear their mother crying.

  By the end of summer, Olga’s trunk in the good chamber was filled to overflowing with dresses, embroidered shifts and stockings turned out by the sewing machine along with the flashing needles of herself and her mother. When in early August the day finally arrived for them to travel to Yannina and buy the rest of the dowry, Eleni asked her brother-in-law Andreas to go with them for protection and propriety, because she was no longer speaking to her father. Olga, tipsy with excitement, had never been to a big city. She dressed carefully for the excursion in a blue dress with two black stripes around the border, topped by the traditional long black sleeveless tunic. On her head was a black kerchief with red and pink roses, and she carried her good shoes in her hand.

  They took the mule as far as Vrosina, where the road began, and found a truckdriver to take them the rest of the way to Yannina. Olga had never ridden in a vehicle before and rode the whole way to Yannina with her eyes closed tight.

  As they approached the city, Eleni made her look. Rising from the velvety green fields, dotted with popcorn sheep, were the houses and minarets of Yannina, and in the middle the lake, smooth as a mirror. They rattled over the cobblestone streets, and Olga stared open-mouthed at the storks in their chimney-top nests, the gypsies with their dancing bears and monkeys, the old women selling lottery tickets, the little boys hawking mastic gum.

  Eleni took a firm hold of Olga’s hand and led her across Averoff Street, through the busy traffic of horses, mules, trucks and carts, and up Venizelos Street, toward the inn called Vrosgou’s Hani, where Liotes usually stayed on their forays into the city. Like all the buildings it was Turkish in style with a courtyard in the back, turning a blind face to the street except for latticed harem windows projecting from the second floor, where women could watch the bustle below without being seen.

  While Andreas carried their belongings up to the rooms, Eleni and Olga sat in the triangular courtyard of the Yiali Kafene across the street. It was raised several feet above pavement level, affording a perfect view of the passing crowd and the splendid neoclassical buildings on the right and left, fantasies of wrought-iron balconies, curlicues and gargoyles. As they ordered a meal Eleni was mentally girding herself for the shopping expedition ahead. The $300, knotted into a handkerchief, felt heavy on her bosom.

  They had come to Yannina to buy the “outside” dowry, the sleeping rugs, blankets, pillows, mattress and coverlets, which were to be piled on top of the dowry chest, for the “inside” dowry—enough clothes for a year—was already collected. Other villagers had given Eleni the names of Vlach women who wove the shaggy, bright-colored sleeping rugs, the velenzes, in their homes.

  They set out for the neighborhood of the Vlachs, a mysterious, taciturn nomadic race of shepherds who still spoke Latin as well as Greek. Vlachs were proverbially wily, but they also wove the best velenzes. As they pushed past the tiny caves of shops with the proprietors soliciting them from their rush-seated chairs outside each door, Olga stared. When they reached the neighborhood of the rug weavers, black-dressed crones and young boys called to them from their thresholds, “Come in, take a look! The finest velenzes in Epiros!”

  In each house, in the room nearly filled by the great loom and piled high with rainbow stacks of velenzes, Eleni expertly felt the weight of the rugs, stroked the pile, examined the underside for flaws and asked questions about the dyes. Each woman would give a price—so many drachmas per kilo—and when Eleni and Olga left the house, they would run after them, offering to lower the price by a few drachmas a kilo. But this was only the first day; too soon to buy.

  On the second morning, mother and daughter returned to the home of a woman whose rugs, Eleni had decided, were of the best workmanship. Cups of coffee appeared from nowhere. “Feel the pile, Kyria,” the woman crooned. “Only the flower of the wool. Not an ounce from the underbelly or legs. The dyes will still be as bright when this beautiful bride has grandchildren.”

  The prize of her collection was a bridal velenza—the rug which goes over the saddle of the mule carrying the dowry—woven in multicolored, elaborate geometries “with a silver flywheel.” Olga fell in love with it, but Eleni managed to appear unimpressed.

  After they got up to leave twice, and twice were physically dragged back into the house, Eleni and the Vlach woman settled on a compromise price which was fair enough to convince both parties they had outwitted the other. There were other things to buy: a large striped mattress, a bright flowered quilt for winter nights, a pair of pillows, and some geometrically patterned bed covers. The night of the second day in Yannina, Olga and Eleni slept the sleep of victorious warriors.

  Before hiring a truck to carry their treasures back to Vrosina, Eleni, Olga and Andreas stopped for a last meal at the Yiali Kafene. As they were halfway through a plate of trout and crayfish fresh from the lake, there was a commotion. From their table they could see a crowd of peasants in village dress excitedly waiting for something. When two open army trucks rolled down Venizelos Street and came to a stop, the crowd erupted into wails and screams.

  The trucks were jammed with young women, no older than Olga, who were also weeping, their faces scratched, their hair snarled and untidy and uncovered by kerchiefs. Eleni got up to see what was happening, but Olga was more interested in her first taste of fish and stayed behind with Andreas. After some time Eleni returned to their table, her face drawn.

  “It’s a group of girls from villages in the Pogoni area,” she said, referring to a region fifty miles northwest of Yannina. “Two months ago they were taken by force by the guerrillas and made to put on uniforms and fight. Those outside are some of the girls that managed to flee to the national army.” She looked at Olga. Like her daughter, the andartinas were only children, but they had eyes like old women. “You should see how the parents cried when they saw them,” she said. “The worst was the parents of daughters who didn’t come back.”

  Olga took little interest in the fate of the unwilling girl soldiers, except to notice with fascination that some of them wore khaki trousers, which shocked her more than the fact that they had been kidnapped from their villages. Olga was lost in anticipation of her triumphant return to Lia with the new dowry, but Eleni couldn’t get the girls’ faces out of her mind. The pitiful reunion with their parents was proof that Minas Stratis had been right in his predictions. And even he had not told her the andartes would conscript girls. What if they tried to take her own daughters? But Christos had given strict orders not to leave the house. In the back of the truck all the way to Vrosina, where they had left the donkey, Eleni turned over this new threat in her mind.

  For Olga, the aftermath of the trip to Yannina was like an endless name-day celebration. Every female in Lia dropped by to examine the new dowry piled on top of the trunk, to feel the pile of the velenzes, exclaim over the workmanship, sip tiny glasses of ouzo or coffee, and offer good wishes for her future engagement.

  Stavroula Yakou came and the Gatzoyiannis girls were especially solicitous of her, for her little son had been born dead some months before. Stavroula no longer moved with the same careless grace, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Like everyone else, she exclaimed over the magnificent dowry and uttered the conventional wish, “May the marriage be well rooted,” but as she spoke, Olga felt an involuntary shudder. Stavroula was looking at her as a caged canary watches a passing swallow.

  In later years, every time Olga thought of her dowry, she’d sigh and say, “I only had three months to enjoy it.” For by the end of November the tide of war would carry the guerrilla force back to Lia, and celebrations of the ordinary ceremonies of life would be ended forever.

  While Olga w
as buying her dowry in Yannina, the DAG of Markos Vafiadis was concentrating its strength in the Zagoria villages to the north of Yannina. After an unsuccessful late-October attack on Metsovo, the town thirty-five miles northeast of Yannina that was the gateway to the only route over the Pindos mountains, the andartes withdrew to sanctuaries on the Pindos massif. It seemed likely that the men in the Epiros Command of the DAG would spend the winter on the Pindos range, launching occasional raids to the south and east. But in late November, under cover of thick fog, six battalions unexpectedly left the Pindos chain and moved westward with the objective of cutting Epiros in half along an east-west axis.

  This force of 1,500 guerrillas intended to base themselves in the rugged Mourgana mountain range that extends along the Greek-Albanian border where Lia was located. They could hold this natural fortress easily with a small force and would have access to Albania, to bring in supplies and evacuate the wounded. From the Mourgana the guerrillas hoped to expand south into Epiros, capture a major town there and set up a provisional government as their first step toward recapturing control of Greece.

  On November 27, 1947, the six constables stationed in Lia received word from their headquarters in Filiates that the guerrilla forces were approaching. They were ordered to take all the weapons and important papers they could carry, hide the rest and evacuate to Filiates at once. The constables moved fast—they had heard about the mutilated bodies of gendarmes in other invaded villages. While two of them dug a hole in the corner of a field behind the police station, screened by a hedge and a shed, the others ran to warn the few men in the village who belonged to MAY—the auxiliary security unit of villagers who helped the police. In Lia there were not many rightists willing to work with the gendarmes against the guerrillas; Andreas Kyrkas was one of them. On that Thursday, the constables woke him from his siesta, telling him to come help them pack the police files and then to get himself to Filiates before he was caught and executed.