Watching the priest’s house in flames, Eleni shivered, wondering which of the villagers would suffer the guerrillas’ vengeance next. She didn’t have long to wonder. Soon a second finger of smoke rose toward the sky. It was the house of the schoolteacher Demos Bessias.
Spiro Skevis was personally on hand when they set the torch to the house of Minas Stratis. Minas had removed his wife and children from the village long before the guerrillas approached, knowing that Skevis would go to any lengths to punish him for evading them the last time. But Minas’ mother, Christina, insisted on staying behind, hoping to protect the family property.
Before they set the Stratis house afire, Spiro Skevis walked through it, looking with a satisfied smile at the possessions of the man who had always been his rival. Minas had amassed the only library the village had ever seen; a whole wall of books. “So many books; too many for a schoolteacher,” the villagers used to whisper, suspiciously. “Too many even for a professor! Who know, what he really does with all these books?”
Spiro was eager to see Minas’ fine library in flames, but first there was something else he was looking for. He knew that for years Minas had bred rabbits. With scholarly thoroughness he kept notes on their markings, coats and progeny. In the cellar Skevis found Minas’ prize pair of angora rabbits, bought in Yannina to cross-breed with the village strain.
Spiro picked up the quivering balls of fur, their pink eyes rolling back in their heads, and carried them outside. He took a length of leather thong and tied them by the feet, then hung them, kicking and squeaking shrilly, over the saddle of the horse his equerry was holding outside.
These rabbits would be the banner of Minas’ defeat. Spiro mounted his horse, the rabbits dangling in front of him, and signaled to the guerrillas who were waiting for his instructions, torches in their hands. “Burn it!” he shouted, and turned the horse around for his triumphal parade through the village.
As Eleni and her children were watching the smoke of the burning houses, Nitsa arrived, puffing breathlessly up the hill. “Boukouvalas’ house is burning!” she shouted. “Minas’ house has fallen into the cellar. Christina’s just standing there, watching it burn!”
“Poor Christina! Wherever will she live now?” said Eleni, full of pity for her cousin who had already suffered so much.
“She can live in the cooking shed, they haven’t burned that,” Nitsa retorted. “Don’t worry about Christina, she’ll survive. Let me tell you what Skevis did to me.”
After setting fire to the houses of the four village elders, the guerrillas began seeking out the members of MAY, the civilian security force, who included Nitsa’s husband. Spiro Skevis arrived at Nitsa’s house, where she was sitting on her front step. He told her, in a conversational tone, that he had nearly killed her husband one day, when as a member of a MAY posse, Andreas was hunting in the mountains for ELAS fugitives and stopped just in front of a boulder where Spiro was hiding. “If Andreas had turned around and seen me, you’d be a widow now,” Spiro said with amusement. Nitsa trembled until he got up to leave, certain that he meant it as a warning. As soon as he was out of sight she packed her things and set out for the Perivoli to move in with Eleni.
Now they were a household of three women and five children crowded into two rooms: the kitchen and the small storeroom behind it. The kitchen was only 12 feet square. They had to sleep in heaps like cords of wood. On one side of the fireplace, under one velenza, slept Megali and Eleni with Nikola between them. On the other side slept Nitsa, who appropriated the spot next to the fire, as well as Fotini, Olga, Glykeria and Kanta.
Within weeks of the guerrillas’ arrival, life in Lia took on a feverish activity. In order to have their western flank secured before the planned Christmas Day attack on Konitsa, the guerrillas’ orders were “complete and quick preparation.” According to the account of one of the andartes, Dimitri Hadjis, who later became a well-known novelist in Greece, “Here in the Mourgana this meant telephone lines passed over deep ravines and passable roads opened in untrodden heights of the mountains. It also meant steps chiseled into the sides of the rock, machine-gun nests built with beams carried for many hours without the help of machines or even tools—everything by hand.” The women of the village worked alongside the guerrillas, building pillboxes in strategic spots throughout the village with the stones they gathered.
Although everyone suffered under the occupation of the guerrillas, by the second week of December, Eleni began to suspect that she had been singled out for special attention. There was a freezing rain falling when a young andarte knocked at her gate and asked if he could come in to dry himself at the fire. She took him into the kitchen and offered him a boiled egg. As he stood near the fireplace, he noticed the photograph of Christos in its shiny brass frame. He asked where her husband was and she explained that he lived in America.
“Look at the gold frames on those glasses!” the young guerrilla said, picking up the photograph. “Do you know how long it would take a workingman to earn enough for such frames? He must be a capitalist and he bought those glasses with the blood of the workers.”
Eleni tensed. “You’re wrong, my child,” she said quickly. “My Christos is a cook in a restaurant owned by someone else.”
“I think he’s a bloodsucker,” the man replied curtly. Then he turned the dime-store frame over and slid the photograph out the back. Behind the black-and-white image of Christos was another picture. Eleni saw to her horror that it was Queen Fredrika, wife of the newly crowned King Paul, who had assumed the throne when his brother George died on April 1, 1947. The young queen stared regally out of the frame, ropes of pearls around her white throat.
The guerrilla turned to Eleni with a triumphant grin. “Look who’s here, Amerikana! Who hid the German bitch for safekeeping? Your father?”
How did this child know about her father’s royalist sympathies? Eleni wondered. “I didn’t even know it was there!” she said. “When Christos sent the photo I gave it to someone who was going to Filiates, to buy a frame for it. You know they sell frames with pictures of kings, queens, war heroes already in them; it must have been there all this time without my knowing it!”
She dismissed the incident as an accident until several days later, when there was a battering on the gate. She opened it to find a tall, chestnut-haired, rather handsome young man in a lieutenant’s uniform who looked at her as if she were an interesting specimen of insect.
He was a thirty-one-year-old former schoolteacher named Sotiris Alexiou who had taken the nom de guerre of “Sotiris Drapetis.” The villagers would soon come to know Sotiris as the sadistic intelligence officer for Lia.
Without a word, Sotiris pushed Eleni aside and began charging through the rooms, opening every box or drawer, tossing the contents on the floor, turning mattresses upside down. She realized that someone must have made some kind of report on her.
Eleni rushed ahead of Sotiris into the small pantry behind the kitchen, where Olga was sitting in her usual spot on top of the trunk that held her “inside” dowry, which they had moved out of the good chamber after the arrival of the Gagas family. “Quick, get out of here!” Eleni hissed at her. “He’s coming inside and he’s going to open everything.”
Olga threw a terrified glance at the velenzes and blankets from Yannina which she had tied up in tight rolls, and then fled into the kitchen where Glykeria was hiding. Sotiris was right behind her mother. He pulled out a knife and cut the rope holding the velenzes, throwing them one by one on the floor and feeling between them.
Tossing the last blanket on the floor, Sotiris turned to Eleni and commanded, “Open this trunk!” She searched frantically for the keys to the padlock—in her pockets; in the niches where she kept matches; in the box of letters from Christos, above the doorjamb; everywhere she kept keys—but she was shaking so much she couldn’t think.
“Hurry up, woman!” Sotiris shouted as she rushed here and there. Disgusted at the delay, he strode into the good chamber and picked u
p the poker from the fireplace. He returned swinging it. As Eleni backed out, he began beating the padlock with the poker until it broke. In a frenzy now, Sotiris tore everything out of the trunk; dresses, slips, stockings, pillowcases, a crocheted tablecloth. He threw them on the dirt floor and pulled out more until the trunk was empty.
Breathing hard, he turned toward Eleni, who was huddled in the doorway separating the kitchen from the small room. “I’m going to search your yard now, Amerikana,” he said, “and if I find a gun anywhere, I’m going to kill you.”
The words “gun” and “Amerikana” shot through Eleni like icicles. Someone must have told the security police, “The Amerikana has a gun hidden on her property,” and she felt again the separateness that the word “Amerikana” implied. Although she had never left the village, she was the foreigner, the one whose wealthy husband lived in a distant land where his money could never be confiscated. She wondered who had reported her, and how far the hatred reached.
“Have you found any weapons in our house, effendi?” she asked. “We have no men, no soldiers here and no weapons. I can guarantee that you’ll find nothing in the house, but I can’t promise about the yard. What if someone has buried a gun there just to get me in trouble?”
Sotiris shrugged. “You’d better pray I don’t find anything. Get me a shovel.”
As soon as he was out the door, Eleni began pacing back and forth. “They’re going to kill us,” she said aloud several times. Then she called Glykeria out of the kitchen and spat on the floor. “Before the spit dries I want you back here with Sioli Skevis! Tell him our lives depend on it. Thank God I’ve got some meat in the gastra! Where are the greens you picked this morning?”
By the time Glykeria returned, out of breath, nearly dragging the leathery old father of Spiro and Prokopi Skevis, the house was filled with the aroma of roasting goat, spiced with oregano and mint. Out in the yard Sotiris was digging holes, helped by two more andartes. As soon as Eleni saw Sioli, she began to cry. “Please, effendi, look at those men outside! They’re searching for guns. They found nothing in the house, but I’m afraid that someone may have hidden one in the yard.”
Sioli Skevis was a pious old man despite the trick he had played on the archbishop to get Spiro into the school in Vela, and he respected the Amerikana. He patted her shoulder, “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m here, and whatever they find, no one’s going to touch you.” He settled himself into a comfortable corner. “What’s that I smell?” he asked.
By the time Sotiris threw down his shovel in disgust, Sioli had finished off most of the kid and, his belt loosened, was dozing happily by the fire. Sotiri had spent a wasted afternoon and found nothing, but Eleni had learned that someone in the village wished her ill. The familiar faces of her neighbors would never look the same again.
Perhaps Sioli Skevis told his son Spiro about the Amerikana’s plight, or perhaps Spiro took a notion to strengthen his ties with a family that carried so much influence in the village. The commander of the battalion appeared at the Gatzoyiannis gate some days after the Sotiris incident, led on horseback up the steep path to the Perivoli by his orderly, who stood smartly at attention holding the reins as Spiro dismounted. Now his face was clean-shaven, his uniform pressed, his manner altogether different from the grim exaltation on the day Eleni heard him tell his men that they were going to squeeze his native village dry.
Kanta, working in the vegetable patch, stared in astonishment at the magnificent figure entering their gate. She recognized him at once, for he had been her substitute teacher in the second grade whenever Minas Stratis had to be away. Spiro remembered her too, even though she was now a young woman of fifteen. As she murmured “Good day” and lowered her head, not looking at him directly, he said, “You’re Alexandra, aren’t you? You were one of my best students.”
She looked down again.
“We need smart girls in the movement,” he went on with a teasing smile. “I’m going to find you a captain to marry. How would you like that?”
“I’m too young to get married, effendi,” she said, looking at his boots.
“In a couple of years, then,” he replied. “You’d like a handsome young captain, wouldn’t you?”
Kanta’s sense of irony got the better of her. “Oh, it’d be fine if your army wins the war!” she said. “But if you lose, the captain would probably end up herding sheep.”
“Don’t worry, we’re going to win,” he said cheerfully. “Look out there.” He gestured, indicating the mountains rimming the bowl of the foothills below. “You see Velouna, Plokista and Taverra?” he said, sweeping the horizon from east to west. “Our men have taken all of them. The fascists are melting away before us like spring ice. Soon we’ll have the whole country. Your young captain might end up a minister in government instead of a shepherd.” He looked at her intently. “I think you have an older sister, don’t you?”
Kanta didn’t answer. She knew Olga was hiding in the pantry with her kerchief over her face.
“You should tell your sister to marry,” Spiro said, not smiling now. “With your father in America, she needs some kind of protection.”
Eleni had come out of the house to greet their noted visitor and heard the remark. She hurried forward, inviting Spiro into the house and summoning Olga from the pantry to prepare a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and some sweets for the major. When Olga brought the tray into the large chamber, she saw that Eleni had handed Spiro the last letter that Christos sent, the one that said she mustn’t leave the house under any circumstances, and that the andartes were “fellow villagers, fighting for their rights.” Olga saw that Spiro was chuckling. He muttered, “Christos, you old rogue!” and then looked up at Eleni and said, “I never realized he was with us.”
Eleni smiled and said nothing but motioned for Olga to bring the coffee over. The girl left the room as soon as she had served it. No one heard what Eleni and Spiro talked about after that, but Kanta noticed that when Skevis left the house and remounted his horse, he was whistling.
Several days after Skevis’ visit, the village was electrified by the sight of a long ragged file of women guerrillas, perhaps a hundred in all, climbing down from the peak of the Prophet Elias, making their way through the Perivoli with andartes at their front and back, and two guarding the sides. The group of andartinas passed right outside the Gatzoyiannis gate, marching in step, guns on their backs, paying no attention to the excited buzz of the villagers who flocked to stare at them.
All the Gatzoyiannis children rushed to see them, even Olga, who hadn’t left the house since the guerrillas arrived. The andartinas were peasant girls in their teens and twenties, with long, thick braids down their backs, but below the braids were khaki uniforms complete with—the villagers could scarcely believe it—men’s trousers! If they had been marching naked, it couldn’t have caused more of a sensation. Nikola was mystified, thinking the soldiers were half man and half woman. None of the Gatzoyiannis children would ever forget their first sight of women in pants.
But Eleni scarcely noticed what the girls were wearing. She was searching their faces, thinking of the weeping villagers she had seen in Yannina.
Just below the Gatzoyiannis house the women were called to a halt by their male officers, who ordered them to fall out and rest in the yards of several houses, including that of Tassina Bartzokis. Eleni shooed her children back inside and hurried down to where her neighbors were drawing water for the andartinas to drink.
They lay on the ground with a lethargy that suggested deep exhaustion. Eleni sat down in the grass near a group who looked no older than Olga. She moved over next to a girl with the round face of a child and asked her name. The girl replied listlessly, adding that she was from the village of Vatsounia.
“You seem so young,” Eleni persisted. “Aren’t you afraid? I have two girls about your age. If they want to join the army, I don’t think I could let them go. Your mother must be so worried!”
The girl turned black-rim
med eyes on her for the first time. “Do you think my mother had a choice?” she said.
“They took you by force?” Eleni asked. “All these girls?”
“All the girls over fifteen, the unmarried ones,” the girl whispered. “Now go away! If they see us talking, they’ll kill you and me both.”
As soon as the women soldiers were ordered to move on, Eleni ran back to her house. Now she understood what Spiro Skevis meant when he said that Olga should be married for her protection.
Eleni called Olga and Kanta into the kitchen and when she looked at their faces, she started to cry. “They’re going to take you! I knew it!” she wept. “Why didn’t you leave when I sent you to Babouri! What will happen to you now?”
The girls looked at her, bewildered. Soon Tassina Bartzokis burst in, also in tears. As soon as she saw Olga she cried, “I’d rather see you and Rano drown yourselves in the irrigation pool than have you taken like those poor girls!”
Eleni and her daughters sat up all night, trying to formulate a plan to save them from being conscripted. Eleni couldn’t stop remembering the faces of the andartinas and imagining her two daughters, who had never spoken to a strange man, being forced to wear trousers, sleep side by side with the guerrillas and fight for their lives on the battlefield. By dawn she was pale but calm. “Go get Rano,” she told them. “We’ll hide you where they’ll never find you. Soon they’ll leave and you’ll be safe.”
The place she had decided on was the Kastro, crowning one of the two peaks above the village, where an ancient acropolis had stood three hundred years before Christ. It was built as a fortress by a race of blond-haired, blue-eyed, wide-browed Dorians as a sanctuary where the inhabitants of the settlements below could retreat when threatened by enemy attack. Here they slaughtered bulls and prayed to Zeus for protection, and here, a hundred years ago, archeologists thought they had found the ruins of the Oracle of Dodona before they settled on another site, sixty-three miles to the south.
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