Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  Nikola saw the anger and helplessness on his mother’s face as she made a fierce gesture to the children, ordering them into the pantry. She warned them in a whisper never to set foot in the kitchen again when the orderly was there. Nikola felt her pain and wished he were a man so he could protect her from the cruelties of the tyrannical little colonel who had usurped his father’s brass bed and ordered his mother about like a servant.

  It was a day or so later that Eleni heard Petritis shouting and saw all the guards being summoned into his office before he stormed out the door. Soon, Eleni was called into the good chamber by Antonis.

  Some of Colonel Petritis’ belongings were missing, the aide told her; small things, but potentially dangerous in the hands of an enemy: bullets, a razor, even some tobacco. The colonel suspected there was a traitor among his men, not all of whom were volunteers. He was going to conduct an exhaustive inquiry.

  Antonis waited for a moment, then added that it seemed odd for the thief to have taken the colonel’s razor and tobacco. Perhaps it was only a child’s prank. Eleni stiffened. “My children wouldn’t touch his things.” she said coldly. “Colonel Petritis is a guest in our house.”

  “Ask them, anyway,” Antonis persisted. “It would be tragic if innocent men suffered as the result of a child’s joke.”

  Eleni could see that he was as frightened as she was. She went to the window and shouted for the children to come in. The note of panic in her voice brought them all at a run.

  Gathering them in the kitchen, Eleni explained what had happened. She noticed that Nikola, unlike the girls, avoided her eyes and became very busy with the fireplace poker. She called him to her and took both his hands.

  “You know that Colonel Petritis is a very powerful man, don’t you?” she asked. He nodded, not meeting her gaze.

  “You wouldn’t want him to hurt Kanta, would you?”

  Nikola looked at her, a spark of cunning in his eyes. “If he got his things back,” he asked, “would he let Kanta come home?”

  Eleni hid her panic and kept her voice calm as she pleaded and coaxed. Though it took nearly a quarter of an hour, in the end he confessed.

  As the neighbors returned home for the noon meal they saw a strange procession, led by Nikola and made up of his mother, Antonis and Petritis, and half a dozen guerrillas with shovels, all very solemn.

  It took only a few minutes to unearth the plunder in the lower garden under Nikola’s shamefaced instructions. One of the guerrillas reached into the hole and picked up a soggy brown sock bulging with lumps. Antonis shook it out on the ground and everyone turned to look at the boy.

  Suddenly Eleni grabbed her son by the ear, twisted it and began shouting, “You little beast! You black devil! Why would you touch the colonel’s things? An honored guest in our house and you act like this!” She drew back her hand and slapped him across the face, her fingers leaving red welts.

  It was the only time she ever hit me. The pain was eclipsed by the shock—the total incredibility—of the realization that she could turn on me. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing my tears. She had failed to understand that it was all done for her; my revenge on the man who had tyrannized and frightened her. She was blind to my devotion. She even slapped and humiliated me in front of the enemy. I went away to lick my wounds in my private hiding place, and not until years later did I come to the realization that she had attacked me first, hoping to defuse the punishment that Petritis was preparing for me.

  It worked. Petritis confined himself to a warning: “From now on, your family will stay on your side of the house and you’ll keep your children in line, Kyria, or there will be very unpleasant consequences.” It was clear to Eleni that Nikola’s prank had ruined her chances of ever convincing the colonel to have Kanta released. She walked wearily back to the house, through a bleak December landscape the color of a charcoal drawing that reflected her despair.

  By the time Eleni reached the door, a faint last hope had occurred to her. The bearded young guerrilla, Nikola Paroussis, had stormed out the door when she reminded him how she hid him during the occupation. But that didn’t alter the fact that he owed her a debt.

  About a week after they were taken from their homes, the women recruits were submitted to one more indignity; the one they had been fearing from the start. They were each handed a khaki uniform, many of them bloodstained and worn, evidently taken from dead bodies. From now on, they were told, they would put aside women’s clothes and dress like fighters of the Democratic Army—in pants. Some giggled but most blushed with embarrassment as they put on the baggy trousers. The smaller girls, like Kanta, had to roll up the legs several times before tucking them into the heavy, cleated boots.

  Kanta would as readily have walked across the village square in her shift as in pants, but to her surprise a few of the girls seemed pleased by their new regalia, imitating the strut of the men, hefting their guns in a self-conscious mimicry of toughness. Girls like Rano and Milia Drouboyiannis seemed to put away their maidenly demeanor with the full-skirted wool dresses they had worn all their lives.

  Their instructors informed them that the afternoon’s indoctrination lesson would be replaced by a display of dancing in the village square. The andartinas would dance in their new uniforms, their guns over their shoulders. They were ordered to smile, to show how happy they were to be fighters in the Democratic Army.

  As the church bells summoned everyone to the square, the andartinas huddled together for protection. When the villagers began to arrive, they stared at the spectacle of the local girls in their shameless apparel. Eleni came with her next-door neighbor, and searched frantically until she saw Kanta, trying to hide herself behind Rano. It was the nearest she had been to her daughter since the girl was taken.

  Frixos arranged the nervous women in a line, putting Kanta, the smallest, at the end. When everyone was assembled, the male guerrillas began to sing, clapping their hands to the martial rhythm of the revolutionary songs. “Today, today, today,” they shouted, “the warriors stand like lions! Today, today, today, the women stand like cypresses …”

  At a sign from Alekos, the girl in the lead, holding a white handkerchief, began the quick steps of the kalamatianos; three paces to the right, two to the left and then a dipping step back before the line snaked forward again. With her right hand on the shoulder of the girl ahead of her, Kanta was thrown off balance by the weight of the gun on her back. Her palms were wet and she couldn’t keep up. Crimson-faced, she left the line and sidled over to Frixos. “Please, Comrade Sergeant, can I dance without the gun?” she asked.

  Angrily he mentioned her back toward the line. “You have to think of the gun as part of your body,” he ordered. “Now get back there and don’t forget to smile.”

  Kanta did her best, her face frozen in a grimace, but she kept losing the step and scurrying to keep up. She saw her mother in front of the crowd, her face full of pain.

  The line wound into a spiral and Kanta was pulled past the astonished faces of the villagers. When she came near her mother, Eleni’s hands reached out, as if to help her. The expression on her mother’s face told Kanta what she must look like in the obscene trousers. The girl dropped her head and Eleni saw her daughter’s tears falling on the ground.

  Several days before Christmas, the activity around Petritis became frenzied; grim, battle-soiled guerrillas arriving in the night, muffled arguments, much shouting. Eleni felt as if a thunderstorm was brewing. One night she heard Petritis bellowing into the field telephone, “We’ll send all we can, but we have to keep enough to protect our own positions.”

  A few days later, several units of guerrillas collected in the village square, their equipment on their backs and on confiscated donkeys. Under the worried eyes of the villagers, they filed up the mountain to the northeast, passing out of sight over the peak of the Prophet Elias. It was clear that a major battle was looming, but where?

  On Christmas Day the andartinas were put through their exercises
as usual, but their instructors seemed distracted. The women heard enough to sense that something important was happening. No one told them that the guerrillas, under the eyes of General Markos, had launched the first major battle of the civil war that morning at Konitsa. Messengers from Petritis arrived at the training ground throughout the day, whispering in the ears of Alekos and Frixos, who seemed pleased with what they heard. The women went to sleep that night amid whispered rumors and speculation.

  The next morning they awoke before dawn to hear the rumble of battle in the foothills below Lia and on the three heights that formed the opposite rim of the bowl, where the guerrillas had their forward lines. As the girls tumbled outside, they could see the smoke and fire of battles far to the south. Like spectators at the top of an amphitheater, they watched the red flare of mortars, the angry, erratic flash of machine guns, and the occasional, graceful arc of a blue flare. In order to divert the Mourgana guerrillas from sending reinforcements to Konitsa, the government troops had engaged the Communists in skirmishes in the foothills.

  That night the andartinas were ordered to pack; they were moving out. The fighting was coming closer and they would be moved to the village of Vatsounia, five miles to the northeast over the top of their own mountains. The machine guns would have to be carried; each woman would take a turn. Kanta was among the first group to have one of the heavy guns strapped to her back.

  The lack of sleep, the sound of battle, and the suspicion that they were being taken away to fight drained their strength. As Kanta struggled up the peak of the Prophet Elias, she bent low under the weight of the machine gun, the acid taste of fear in her mouth. She fought to keep up with the rest in the darkness, afraid of losing her foothold and falling under the gun.

  It was Afrodite Fafoutis, a scrawny seventeen-year-old just ahead of her, who collapsed in a faint before they reached the flat threshing floor on the plateau below the chapel to the Prophet. The girl lay there motionless as the officers began to curse and nudge her with their boots. They discharged a rifle next to her ear to see if she was malingering, but when she didn’t flinch, they angrily unstrapped the rifle from her back and ordered the rest to move on, leaving Afrodite lying where she had fallen. Kanta looked back once or twice until the pale figure faded into the darkness. A firm believer in ghosts, she felt the night was crowded with fleshless, grinning figures of death, waiting to seize her the moment she stepped off the path.

  When they stopped for a five-minute rest to transfer the loads, Kanta heard the sound of a horse approaching. Someone lit a kerosene lantern and out of the darkness emerged a rider. It was Nikola Paroussis, the gaunt, fair-bearded young andarte whom her mother had hidden in the storeroom two years before. He dismounted and spoke to the officers, then walked down the line of women. As he came to Kanta he smiled in recognition and said, “How goes it, little one? Have they made an andartina out of you?”

  The kindness in his voice made her blurt out her fears. “Oh, Nikola, I’m going to die! I can’t carry the gun, I can’t eat out of the common pot. I’m starving to death and I want to go home!”

  He gave her a conspiratorial wink and made a “chin up” gesture. Then he vanished into the darkness, leaving Kanta staring after him.

  When the villagers of Lia awoke on the morning of December 27, they realized that the battle to the south was coming closer, having moved down from the opposite hills into the foothills below. By midmorning Eleni made another discovery that left her pale and shaken. Glykeria came running into the house shouting, “Mana! The andartinas are nowhere in the village! They took Kanta away in the night!”

  The mothers of the Perivoli gathered in worried knots to whisper, afraid that their daughters had been sent into the battles they could hear raging below. But toward noon, reassuring word reached them: the village girls had been seen marching in the opposite direction, toward the northeast.

  It took all night for the group of andartinas to get to Vatsounia, where they were barracked in the school, set across a wide square from the small stone houses. Chilled and exhausted, they fell to the floor to sleep for the few hours that remained before reveille woke them at dawn.

  After they were transferred to Vatsounia, away from their homes, a subtle transformation came over them. Kanta felt more miserable and lonely than ever, knowing that her mother had no idea where she was, but she noticed that the other girls were changing in puzzling ways. Some tried to outdo the others to impress their instructors with their marksmanship. Instead of gossiping and commiserating together, they divided into cliques, parroting the propaganda slogans of the indoctrination lectures and whispering about girls they suspected of disloyalty to the cause. Even Rano seemed different; harder, somehow, and freer in her conversation with the male guerrillas.

  Some of the girls from the village, like Milia Drouboyiannis, who would have blushed if a passing shepherd bade them “Good morning,” now openly flirted with the men. Kanta had never forgotten her mother’s advice to keep as far away as possible from the guerrilla guards at night, and she often sat up in a corner, forcing herself to keep her eyes open until she was certain that the men in the same room were asleep.

  One night she watched a pretty, blond girl of about twenty stretch herself out next to a young andarte, lying close enough to touch him. Kanta saw the man’s face tense and he turned his back, pretending to be asleep.

  The older girls in the group often whispered that the men were given a potion to suppress their sex drive, but Kanta suspected that their celibacy owed more to the fact that any andarte accused of tampering with one of the women could be tried, sentenced and executed before a firing squad on the spot. She had seen the dead body of a guerrilla accused of rape paraded on horseback from village to village to dramatize the fate of those who flaunted the DAG’s rule of chastity.

  Kanta sat up for many hours that night, watching the girl from her village and the young guerrilla sleeping side by side, and pondered the astonishing things she had seen and learned in the two weeks since she had been taken from her home.

  While the unmarried women of Lia were being transformed into guerrillas, the married ones left behind were burdened with increasing duties as war approached the village. Because there were four adult women in the Gatzoyiannis house—Eleni, her mother Megali, her sister Nitsa and Olga—the guerrillas’ representatives came nearly every day to demand one of them for a work detail. But Olga was still disabled by the burn on her foot, Megali wept and insisted that she was too old to go, and then, one day in late December, Nitsa delivered an announcement that she would no longer be able to participate in any heavy work either: she was pregnant.

  The statement, delivered with satisfaction at the astonishment it provoked, stunned the family with the impact of a bomb. Everyone smiled uncertainly, convinced that she was joking. But the subject of pregnancy was no joke to Nitsa. She had prayed for a child every day for the past twenty-five years. She had swallowed holy candle wicks and bits of umbilical cords, stuffed her sleeping pallet with lumpy garlic bulbs, bought countless bits of malewort and bottles of magic water from the local witches. Last October, a month before her husband fled the village with the other men, she had launched her most ambitious charm.

  She had made a flexible “candle” a hundred yards long by applying soft wax to a great length of hemp rope, then placed it all the way around the outside of the burned Church of the Virgin. After lighting one end, she solemnly sat cross-legged in the middle of the rubble for an entire day and night until the flame traveled the circumference of the church. It was this spell, Nitsa told her amazed mother and sister, that had finally done the trick. “The Virgin has made me a miracle, she has planted a child in my womb, and I refuse to risk my only chance at happiness by lifting or bending or doing anything that could cause a miscarriage,” she announced with great self-importance.

  “God grant that it’s so, sister,” Eleni said, “but you’re forty-four years old! How do you know that you’re not having a change of life?’
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  “Nonsense!” Nitsa replied, unruffled. “All the signs of pregnancy are there: my monthly bleeding has stopped, my breasts are swollen with milk, my stomach has already grown so that I can’t fasten my skirts, and when a lead weight on a string is held over my belly, it swings straight back and forth. There’s no possibility for doubt. So you see why I can’t risk doing any heavy work.”

  Nitsa’s pregnancy became the talk of the Perivoli. All the women agreed that she indeed looked the part, and her belly grew so quickly that they began to talk of twins. She adopted the swaying gait that all proudly pregnant Greek women affect—back arched, stomach thrust forward—walking on her heels with the slow, side-to-side majesty of a rajah’s elephant. The miraculous child would be born in August, she said.

  Thus Eleni became the only female in the house still capable of fulfilling the family’s obligations to the work details. Scarcely a day passed when she was not busy from morning to night working for the guerrillas, cooking, gathering firewood, carrying supplies and messages, mending uniforms and building fortifications. And ever since the fighting in the foothills began on Christmas Day, the women of Lia had been assigned a new duty which Eleni found more disturbing than all the others: carrying the wounded.

  From the foothills guerrillas came nearly every day carrying comrades bleeding from bullet and shrapnel wounds. The women had to transport the victims in relays to Babouri, where a new team would take over as far as Tsamanta, and still another group of women would carry them to Albania and medical help: After the government forces moved closer and entered Tsamanta on December 30, the westward route to Albania was cut off and the wounded had to be taken in the other direction; northeast toward Vatsounia.

  The stretchers were made of canvas suspended between two long poles, and each one required four women. No matter how careful the carriers were, the wounded man would moan with each jolt. The women’s palms became blistered; muscle cramps traveled across their shoulders and down into their legs.