Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  It took little more than an hour, climbing straight up past the timberline, to reach the Kastro. The acropolis was originally surrounded by a high wall, and on the far side the precipice fell straight down, impossible for anyone to ascend. But if a climber lowered himself, hand over hand, fifty feet down, clinging to the rocks and shrubs, he would find a natural balcony which the ancients reinforced with a small wall, where lookouts could see for miles, making a surprise attack from the north impossible.

  This tiny outcrop on the sheer northern face of the cliff had become so overgrown with scrub pine that no one would know it was there. Olga, Kanta and Rano slid over the top and let themselves down into it, rigid with fear, not looking down, knowing that a slip could send them hurtling into the depths below. Wedged into the little balcony, barely large enough for the three of them, they were invisible. Rano insisted that if the guerrillas came for them, she would throw herself over the side as the Souliote women had to escape the Turks. Olga said Rano was crazy. Kanta said she was hungry and cold.

  At night the wind screamed around their perch. The air was like ice water, and the rustlings and howlings from the ancient fortress walls over their heads reminded Kanta of the fearful ghosts she had been told lived in the ruins. Far below them, hawks and crows wheeled, watching the chasm where a stream glimmered like the scratch of a silver hairpin in the green.

  They huddled together there for three days, sleeping sitting up, their backs against the cliff wall, their legs chafed by the underbrush. They couldn’t get out, even to relieve themselves, for the rock balcony was their whole world.

  Every day either Glykeria or Angeliki climbed up the height of the Kastro, and after a shout to make sure the fugitives were still there, tossed down bread and cheese wrapped in a cloth. The three girls had blankets to warm themselves, but their lips were blue, and the drifting snowflakes froze on their eyelashes. They cried and talked about what their families at home were probably eating and how warm it would be by the fire. Finally Kanta rebelled. “Let them take me!” she exclaimed, her voice sailing into the great silence below. “It’s better than freezing to death!” And without another word she started climbing up, hand over hand, clinging to projecting rocks and shrubs. Even though she was the youngest, Kanta’s defection drained Olga and Rano’s courage, and they began to climb up after her.

  When it was dark, Kanta crept back to her mother’s house and knocked softly at the back door. As soon as Eleni saw her, she pulled her inside. “They’ve come around asking for both of you,” she said. “They have a list with names. I said you were away in the fields with the flocks. You can’t come home now!”

  She paced up and down the narrow hall, then she remembered another hiding place: the pit in Rano’s backyard. It was a large hole that the family had dug during the occupation to hide trunks of valuables in case the Germans took the village. After the war the trunks had been dug up, but the pit remained and now was so overgrown that it was nearly invisible.

  The three girls crawled into the hole, only a hundred yards from the Gatzoyiannis gate, and Eleni fortified them with more blankets and a pan of spicy boiled lentils. At first it seemed much better: they were protected from the wind, and the heat of their bodies would provide the warmth they needed.

  They argued about who would sit in the middle and agreed to change places every few hours. They stayed awake telling ghost stories and gossiping about other girls in the village, but finally they fell asleep, and it began to rain. Even though the December drizzle did not form snow at this altitude, it seemed colder than on the peak of the Kastro. The hole smelled like a tomb, and in the night, slimy things crawled over their feet, leaving iridescent trails that shone in the light of dawn. They felt their resolution eroding. They were children, and all they wanted was home.

  Two days were passed inside the pit, but on the second night when Glykeria came by with their evening meal, they begged her to ask Eleni for a better hiding place. Kanta complained that her feet had become like wood. She couldn’t stand up if she tried. They were tired of being buried alive.

  Soon Eleni appeared, standing over the hole, holding a pan that held the promise of meat. She told the girls she had found them a warm hiding place and took them to the cellar-stable of Vangeli Botsaris, two houses up from her own, inhabited by three gentle-eyed goats who stared at them quizzically as they burrowed their legs into the manure heap which radiated warmth. They didn’t even notice the smell—they had been living too long with the odor of their own unwashed bodies.

  It was far better than the Kastro and the pit, but the three girls spent only a day and a night there, their sleep punctuated by the coughing of the goats, until Eleni came running up, her hair flying loose from her kerchief, crying that the girls had to come at once or they’d all be shot. “They said I had to produce you or I’d die.”

  Olga and Kanta hurried home and scrubbed off the manure as best they could. Eleni washed, brushed and braided Olga’s hair as she had when she was a little girl. Because Olga was the first-born, Eleni worried more about her than about the others. When Olga was a baby, Eleni used to get up and light a lamp and watch her lying in the wooden cradle, her tiny hands closed, her lips working, dreaming of the breast. Eleni had a horror of smothering the baby while she slept and would only nurse her sitting up. According to whispers she had heard, her own second sister, for whom Olga was named, died when Megali rolled over in her sleep on top of the infant.

  Olga had always been spoiled and coddled, and now she was to be taken as a soldier. She had entered puberty at fourteen, and her body had the curves of a woman, while Kanta, now fifteen, still hadn’t matured and was small for her years. Olga slept like the dead—who knows what the guerrillas might do to her in her sleep? But Kanta was a light sleeper and had a native shrewdness that Olga lacked entirely.

  Eleni’s mind raced like a mouse in a trap. While Megali and Nitsa wept over the two girls as if they were already dead, Eleni tried not to lose control. She thought about what would become of Olga if she was taken up into the mountains, to sleep beside the guerrillas and fight with a gun. She finally came to an agonizing decision. She would rather have her daughter mutilated and alive than dead or raped, she concluded. Once she had made up her mind, Eleni called the family together—including Nikola and Fotini, who listened to what she said, not yet understanding.

  If Olga couldn’t walk, the guerrillas couldn’t take her, Eleni said. Olga nodded, frightened but proud of being the center of all eyes. They would pour boiling water over her foot, Eleni continued grimly, and tell the guerrillas it was an accident.

  As they put a kettle on the fire, Olga tried to prepare herself. The only painful thing that had ever happened to her was when she fell out of the walnut tree and broke two fingers, but although she tried to remember how it felt, she couldn’t.

  When the water was boiling, Eleni handed Olga a cloth and told her to put it into her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream and rouse the neighborhood. They propped her naked right foot on a stool and put a large pot underneath to catch the water. Olga had always taken pride in her small hands and feet, delicate as a child’s. Eleni picked up the pot and shut her eyes. Everyone was watching.

  The tense faces of my mother, sisters and grandmother seemed unfamiliar in the red glow of the fire. Unconsciously I had stuffed my fist into my mouth, in imitation of Olga with the cloth in hers. My mother took a deep breath and poured the water over the extended foot, while my aunt held the leg so that Olga couldn’t draw back. For an instant there was silence and then, despite the cloth, Olga began to make high-pitched squeals that reminded me of the sound of a kid being slaughtered.

  We all stood staring at the foot while Olga silently wiped her tears with the cloth. The skin on top immediately turned red and puffed up with blisters. After a while my mother and aunt exchanged looks as they realized the plan had failed. Olga’s feet had become so hard from walking barefoot that it didn’t look bad enough. The guerrillas would take her anyway.r />
  My mother sat down heavily, looking sick. I saw her eyes stray to the fireplace where a poker was leaning against the wall. She went over, picked it up and held it in the flames. The others understood what she was doing before I did, and gasped. Olga began crying softly. When the end of the poker was glowing, I watched my mother walking toward Olga and I began to back away. Olga screwed her face up like a child waiting to be hit, her eyes squeezed shut. My mother leaned over the foot. There was a pulse beating just below the ankle. Her face seemed to age, and she turned away, dropping the poker. “I can’t do it,” she whispered. I realized I had been holding my breath and let it out explosively.

  My grandmother spoke into the silence. “I can,” she said, “if it will save my granddaughter.” We all turned in amazement to look at the frail, birdlike old woman who had always seemed so helpless. She picked up the poker and reheated it in the fire. Then I saw my grandmother thrust it into the can of hydrochloric acid which was used for cleaning the inside of scorched pots. The poker was shaking violently as she turned toward Olga, who, forgetting about the cloth, began to slide off the chair onto the floor. My aunt pinned her to the floor with both hands on her shoulders. My mother grabbed the ankle of the blistered foot and turned her face away. I felt I was in a bad dream; they couldn’t be doing this! I closed my eyes to make the scene go away.

  The sizzle of the poker hitting flesh filled the room. Then Olga shrieked and was cut off by my aunt clasping the cloth over her mouth. I heard an answering groan from my mother. I looked and saw my grandmother lifting the poker off Olga’s foot with a gobbet of skin clinging to it, leaving visible raw meat below, white shiny tendons in the pale red flesh. There was a pungent odor in the room, which haunts me still. I bolted out the door and into the yard.

  At the sight of her foot Olga screamed again, but Eleni gently turned the girl’s face away and put a damp cloth to her cheeks, her own face wet with tears. Fotini could not stop looking at the foot. Megali hurried away and returned with a cabbage. She wrapped cabbage leaves around the raw wound to make it swell, and the prickly leaves were like alcohol on the flesh. Olga writhed and moaned while Eleni and Nitsa tried to hold her still. When she had finished her work, Megali wrapped the foot around with a white cloth.

  For most of the night Olga lay sobbing in her mother’s lap. Kanta couldn’t sleep either. She couldn’t get the sound of the poker and the smell of burning flesh out of her mind, and when she did doze off before dawn, she awoke with nightmares of huge, bearded soldiers chasing her. She knew that her mother had chosen Olga for salvation and decided on herself to go because she was younger and less likely to be raped. She felt terribly lonely.

  The next morning Olga screamed again when they removed the bandages and the cabbage leaves. It was so swollen, it didn’t even look like a foot. The ankle was gone. The wound was leaking pus, and angry red lines ran up the leg. Olga couldn’t even sit up, much less stand. They gently re-wrapped the foot and left her lying on her pallet.

  Later in the day Eleni walked over to Tassina’s house, which was being used by the guerrillas as a dispensary. She asked the guerrilla-doctor if he would be kind enough to look at her daughter’s foot. It was just a kitchen accident, she explained, a coal rolled out of the fireplace and burned the top of the foot. “We put mouse oil on it right away,” said Eleni, referring to the standard village burn remedy of oil in which a dead mouse has been suspended, “but there seems to be something wrong—the foot is all swelled up.”

  The doctor agreed to have a look, and when he unwrapped the bandages, the shock showed on his face. “This is infected, she could lose the foot!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give you some ointment—none of that village nonsense!—and you must keep the wound clean and change the bandages every day. She isn’t to walk on it for several weeks at least. I’ll be back in a few days to see her.”

  They all congratulated each other. Eleni had played her part so well that the doctor seemed to suspect nothing. But the next day two andartes came by with a list in their hands, containing the names of every unmarried girl in Lia over fifteen. They had heard from the doctor about Olga’s “accident” and demanded that the bandages be removed. When Eleni saw them wince at the sight, she knew that she had saved her daughter. But the soldiers seemed angry, and before they left, they commanded, “Have your second daughter, Alexandra, ready to join the People’s Democratic Army tomorrow morning.”

  By the end of December 1947 the Greek Communist Party was ready to drive the linchpin of its new strategy and prove to the world that it had the strength to seize power. Now that key mountain strongholds were secure, the DAG would announce the formation of a provisional government and quickly capture a major population center to serve as its capital.

  The Communist guerrillas were in complete control of the Mourgana massif, stretching for twenty miles along the border between Greece and Albania, as well as the Grammos mountains on the northern end of the Pindos range, where the provinces of Epiros and Macedonia meet. From these bases they could threaten the entire northwest region of Greece including the capital of Epiros—Yannina.

  On Christmas Eve the Democratic Army’s radio station, located in Albania, announced the formation of a provisional Democratic Government of Free Greece under the presidency of Markos Vafiadis. The country tensed, waiting for the other shoe to drop—the expected attack on a town to serve as the new “government’s” capital. Yannina seemed the likely target.

  Within twenty-four hours, before dawn on Christmas Day, the Communist guerrillas launched their attack not on Yannina but on Konitsa, forty miles north of the provincial capital. Konitsa had the virtues of lying between their major strongholds in the Mourgana and Grammos mountains as well as being just twelve miles from the Albanian border.

  Only hours after the citizens had returned from midnight mass, Markos threw his force of 10,000 guerrillas at the town of 5,000. The alarm was sounded and the defenders barricaded themselves in every house.

  For the Communist guerrillas it was vital to win this battle. By establishing their capital in Konitsa, they hoped to earn recognition for their provisional government from socialist countries, and full material support from the one ally essential to their victory—the Soviet Union. An unconvinced Russia had, until now, provided only limited aid through the Communist countries bordering Greece—Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

  Markos concentrated all the manpower and heavy artillery he commanded on the Christmas Day attack. One of the first important positions captured was the bridge at Bourazani spanning the river Aoos, over which any reinforcements from Yannina would have to travel.

  It seemed impossible that Konitsa could hold out against the vastly superior forces of the attackers, but the guerrillas had not counted on the desperation of the townspeople, surrounded and cut off from any escape route, who fought alongside the government troops, turning every house into a small fort. While the world watched, the battle of Konitsa stretched on from Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve.

  To support the attack, Markos pulled as many guerrillas as possible away from their positions in the Mourgana. The government troops, with superior manpower, tried to prevent the shift by attacking the guerrilla positions in the Mourgana. Suddenly the occupied villages like Lia found themselves engulfed in the maelstrom of war.

  IT WAS ELEVEN DAYS before Christmas, the night of December 14, 1947, when the guerrillas came to the Gatzoyiannis house and ordered Eleni to prepare her second daughter for the Democratic Army. Although she had managed to save Olga, she knew Kanta was lost. Eleni spent the hours until dawn mourning the loss of the daughter who was most like herself.

  Olga and Glykeria had inherited the round contours and soft features of their father, but Kanta was angular and thin, with the same high cheekbones, sharply etched mouth and deep-set, intense eyes as her mother. She had passed her fifteenth birthday, only two days before the guerrillas occupied the village, but she still seemed a child, fragile and flat-chested as a boy.


  Mother and daughter sat together, unable to sleep, and Eleni stroked Kanta’s hair. “If you faint and act like you’re sick and pretend to be too stupid to learn, they may get disgusted and let you go,” she advised. “Tell them you’re afraid of the guns. How can they send a baby like you to the battlefield?” She paused to choose her words, then added, “At night keep as far away from the guerrillas as you can. If you let down your guard and fall asleep at the wrong moment, you could be ruined forever.”

  Eleni pushed back images of Kanta being raped or shot and consoled herself with the thought that although she was the frailest of the girls, she was also the smartest. Until she put on the kerchief, Kanta had been the best student in school. Like Eleni, she had always burned with the ambition to escape the village and discover the world beyond. The girl was also as fastidious as her mother. She complained that her sisters smelled bad, and refused to eat food cooked by Nitsa, making sarcastic remarks about her aunt’s sloppy dress, greasy hair and dirty fingernails.

  Although she was as thin as shepherd’s crook, food was Kanta’s obsession, just as fine clothes was Olga’s. The only way Eleni could bribe her to spend a day in the high pastures with the flocks was to promise her a special dish for supper. Once, her patience stretched beyond its limits, Eleni half jokingly laid a curse on her two eldest daughters. “You!” she said to Olga. “May you grow up to have trunks of clothes and never find anything you like to wear! And you, black one,” she added, turning to Kanta, “may you have a pantry full of food and never be satisfied with what you’re eating.”

  Eleni often indulged Kanta’s moods because she knew the girl was more high-strung than the others, too sensitive to attend funerals, out the door at the first threat of tears or anger. Since she was a baby, Kanta had passed through phases of nightmares, sleepwalking, nervous stomach aches and fainting spells. Remembering all this, Eleni wondered how she could ever survive as an andartina. She could only pray that her intelligence and the stubbornness that lay at the core of that small body might save her.