Each of the daughters said goodbye in her own fashion to the house where she had been born. Olga collected her dowry from its hiding place in Rano and Tassina’s house, lovingly wrapped it in a tarpaulin and carried it down to her grandmother’s. Fotini clutched the small sack of baubles that she had been given by the commissary head, Hanjaras. Nikola silently walked around outside, paying a last visit to the places which were as familiar to him as his mother’s face.
Leaving the house was the first major dislocation in my life. Invaders, battles, bombs, executions and famine had afflicted Lia in the eight years since I was born, but every day I had awakened to see the same view of the mountains below, with the mulberry tree in the foreground, and every night I had fallen asleep by the same hearth with my mother and sisters around me. I knew every inch of the Perivoli; where each chicken hid its eggs, when every tree would flower and bear fruit and where the crows would land to peck for food and perhaps blunder into one of my crude traps. I passed the spot in the garden where I had built my unsuccessful swimming pool and visited the hay shed up above the mill of the Mitros family where I once watched a newlywed couple, seeking privacy from their relatives, engaged in mysterious acrobatics which I described to my family with such vivid mimicry and sound effects that my recitation became an instant success throughout the Perivoli.
I took a last look at the hillocks and low walls where the boys of the neighborhood had played war. There were no boys my age living near my grandparents’ house, and although I had never managed to win the admiration of Niko Mitros, I would miss the companionship of the neighborhood boys, even the crybaby Lakis, who was, in fact, my closest friend.
I knew my house and my yard as thoroughly as a prisoner knows his cell, and now that we were to leave, I felt the same foreboding a prisoner might have at suddenly finding his cell door open. My grandparents’ house seemed a sinister place to me, because, even with my grandfather gone, his stern, threatening presence still filled every cranny.
The move from the security of the Perivoli to the Haidis house lower down was the first rent in the fabric of my life, more disturbing to me than the great move that would come later, from Greece to America. By then it didn’t matter what place I left and where I went, because there was no longer a corner left in the world that could seem secure.
The next morning, three security officers arrived at the Gatzoyiannis house shortly after dawn. They were all large and muscular and had the cold eyes of police everywhere.
Worldlessly, the Gatzoyiannis family watched the men enter their house, accompanied by Sotiris Drapetis, who would be in charge of gathering intelligence in the village. Then, driving the animals ahead of them, they made the trip down from the Perivoli for the last time, never looking back.
The arrival of a security police station immediately made a subtle but pervasive change in the atmosphere of Lia. It brought the villagers heady new powers and a universal insecurity. Gossip had always been the spice that seasoned the drabness of village life and made it palatable. On a mountainside where each house overlooks the yard below, nothing can be hidden. If a woman fought with her husband or neglected to do her washing, if two men fell out over a backgammon game, everyone in the village would know it within twenty-four hours and argue the details for a week.
No one was immune to gossip. If a man was not ugly or short, a fool, a drunkard, a cheat, a miser or a cuckold—that is, if there was nothing reprehensible or in any way extraordinary about him—then he would be tarred with the brush of his clan. The grandfather of Lukas Ziaras, for example, had been a compulsive gambler, a slave to the dice, which is why his last name, Spiropoulos, was forgotten and replaced with Ziaras, meaning “dice.” Forever afterward, the Ziaras clan was suspected of having a weakness for gambling.
Village gossip had always been relatively harmless, but the police station suddenly gave it a new importance. Until the arrival of the police, no one really listened to the villagers’ complaints against one another. Now a man could go to them and complain that his neighbor had chests full of corn while everyone else was going hungry, and the very next day a team of guerrillas would burst into the neighbors’ house to confiscate all the corn. If a woman was tired of the constant work details and resenting the fact that her neighbor across the way was called less often, she might go to the security police and say that the other woman had put a stone in her mule’s shoe to make it lame. The neighbor would promptly be arrested and led away. Neither of the informants was any better off than before, but it gave them a sense of power to see how easily their neighbors could be made to suffer. Every day the path to the Perivoli was busy with villagers who had some misbehavior to report, always with the insistence that their names be kept secret. The security police nodded and listened carefully, and after the informant left, they made notes and passed the information on to Sotiris, who wrote it all down in his notebook. Within weeks of the arrival of the security police, the village of Lia was engulfed in paranoia.
The police officers themselves encouraged this fear. They let it be known that favors would be granted to those who reported any words or actions that suggested lack of “cooperation” with the guerrillas. Whenever two or more villagers were seen engaged in conversation, one of the officers would walk up and inquire what they were talking about. Furthermore, it was rumored that the police had Machiavellian machines that could hear the most intimate whispers right through the walls of houses. This was accepted as fact by the villagers, because visitors to the new police station had seen a heavy round machine with a hand crank sitting on the table emitting a sinister hum, no doubt storing up secrets and misdeeds in its insides. They didn’t know that it was only a dry-cell battery to power the telephone.
Because the local men had fled in the wake of the guerrillas, Lia was primarily a village of women and children, so most of the informers were female. Certain women were suspected of earning special favors not only by informing on their neighbors, but also by sharing the guerrillas’ beds. Two women were most frequently accused of collaborating in this way. One was Calliope Bardaka, the pretty, round-faced young widow and devout Communist whose husband had disappeared in 1943, killed by EDES while delivering messages for ELAS, leaving her with two small children to feed. She was seen every day entering the security-police station and was often present as a witness when villagers were called in for questioning. The other was Stavroula Yakou Dangas, the village beauty whose husband Dimitri had returned to his bakery in Khalkis soon after the death of their baby son, abandoning her to the mercies of her mother-in-law. Although Dimitri Dangas was now fighting with the government forces, his wife was one of the strongest supporters of the guerrillas, who put her in charge of assigning village women and their mules to work details. Calliope Bardaka and Stavroula Yakou quickly became the most feared women in Lia.
The move to the Haidis house left the Gatzoyiannis family desperately short of food. In the Perivoli they had the produce from their garden and, surrounded as they had been by the army’s slaughterhouse, bakery, commissary and warehouses, there were always ways to skim off a bit of the guerrillas’ supplies now and then. Nearly every woman assigned to bake fourteen okas (about 40 pounds) of bread with a ten-oka sack of flour managed to hold back enough to make her own family one loaf, even though the guerrillas weighed the finished bread to prevent this. Hanjaras, the butcher, was not above slipping refuse meat—heads, tripe, brains and entrails—to children who begged winningly. A pretty young woman who was willing to flirt a little, like Rano Athanassiou, could convince the guerrillas to trade her a bit of flour, salt or soap in exchange for eggs.
One of Eleni’s former neighbors was an expert at charming the guerrillas into giving her treats of food, until the presence of the security police dried up nearly all such under-the-table gifts. Kostina Thanassis was a plump, grandmotherly old woman with a jolly disposition whose house, just below the Gatzoyiannis home, was used to store supplies. Kostina fussed over the guerrillas as if they were her own so
ns, boiling their uniforms to kill the lice, darning their socks and playing on their homesickness. “My golden boy, you’re looking feverish!” she would croon. “Let me brew you a cup of camomile tea. How your poor mother must be worrying about you!”
The guerrillas basked in Kostina’s attentions, repaying her with gifts of unobtainable honey, marmalade and lard. Because the old woman had always made a special pet of Nikola Gatzoyiannis, she would occasionally walk down to the Haidis house with some of these precious items for the boy, which he would share with the whole family.
But without her garden and her proximity to the guerrillas’ commissary, Eleni soon found herself with little corn flour and no salt at all. Kanta, still picky about food, stubbornly refused to eat the unsalted bread on the family’s table. Her mother had exhausted her store of proverbs: “Better today’s bread than tomorrow’s pita;” “In a drought even a hailstorm is welcome.” Now, fixing the girl with a look that made her squirm, Eleni announced, “Salt or no salt, you have to eat this bread to survive. And I’m going to see that you survive even if you have to eat roots and slugs!”
Nevertheless, her heart ached for the children as she watched them trying to choke down the tasteless bread. She confided her problem to Angeliki Botsaris Daikos, who lived just above the Haidis house.
“Come with me when I visit my Aunt Soula in the Perivoli,” said Angeliki, whispering in case any of the security police’s listening devices were beamed her way. “The guerrillas bake all their bread in her cooking shed, and I’m sure she could find you some salt.”
Eleni set out with Angeliki to climb the path to the Perivoli for the first time since the family was evicted. As she passed her own house she was shocked to see the pale faces of prisoners peering out of the small barred windows of her cellar, where the goats had been kept. Six guerrillas lounged about, standing guard. Eleni saw into the courtyard, where a woman in village dress, flanked by a girl of about thirteen, was talking earnestly to a group of guerrillas. The woman wore a long, red-bordered, sleeveless black tunic that showed she came from a village in the Pogoni region. The girl, with wavy russet hair, held her mother’s hand. Eleni watched uneasily, assuming that they had come from a distant village to inquire about one of the prisoners. She moved closer, trying to eavesdrop, but one of the guards at the gate waved her away. “Get along, there’s nothing to look at here,” he ordered. As the two women quickened their pace, Eleni noticed that none of her former neighbors came out of their gates to greet her. A strange silence lay over her old neighborhood.
When they arrived at the house of Angeliki’s aunt at the very top of the Perivoli, the comforting scent of baking bread and the warm welcome of Soula Botsaris lifted her uneasiness a little. Soula invited Angeliki and Eleni inside, and when she heard of Eleni’s plight, disappeared, returning with a small cloth bag of salt. “Don’t talk about paying me!” she whispered. “Neighbors have to help each other in difficult times. Just don’t tell anyone where you got this.”
Suddenly a groan from the other room made the hairs on Eleni’s arms rise. At first she thought it was a sick animal, but then the sound formed itself into a word: “Water!”
Soula put her finger to her lips and motioned for them to peek through the keyhole into the other room. Eleni bent down to look and caught her breath. A man wearing the remains of a uniform lay on the floor inside, stretched out on a large wooden plank. His legs and arms were tied to the board with wire. He moved restlessly and Eleni saw that the wire had worked its way a half inch into the flesh of his ankles. His face was turned away but she could hear the nearly unintelligible moan: “Water! Please, water!”
She turned to look at Soula and the woman whispered, “It’s one of the prisoners. They had too many to fit them all in your cellar.”
“For God’s sake, can’t you give him a little water?” Eleni demanded.
“Don’t be stupid, child!” said the older woman in a suddenly cold voice. “If they caught me, I’d end up the same way he is.”
That night as the family crowded around to taste the fresh bread Eleni had baked with the salt, she watched them eat for a moment; then, in a voice that made them stop and look at her, she ordered the children never to climb the path to the Perivoli again. In answer to their questions she said only, “Terrible things are happening up there. Everything’s changed.”
• • •
Most of the children accepted Eleni’s ultimatum without complaint. As respectable young women, Olga and Kanta were confined to the house anyway. Nikola and Fotini had become used to being allowed to play only within the boundaries of the Haidis land. Nikola had made the bean field below the house his private retreat and would often lie on his back there and watch the clouds scudding across the March sky. Because none of his friends came to visit, he had a lot of time to think.
But to fourteen-year-old Glykeria, who was incorrigibly curious, Eleni’s warning was a challenge. One sunny afternoon when the rest were taking the siesta, she crept up the back gardens behind their old house to see what her mother meant. Climbing from one terraced field to another, she went as far as the retaining wall that bounded the lower edge of their property, and peered over, peeking at the side farthest from the path.
The air was sweet with the scent of the almond trees, and the breeze carried to her ears the rhythmic crunch of someone digging. As she poked her head higher over the wall, Glykeria saw a uniformed guerrilla standing in a deep hole shoveling dirt. On the far side of the hole stood two men, their hands behind them. In a flash the girl understood the tableau in front of her. The bound prisoners were going to be executed and the guerrilla was digging their grave before their eyes. She looked around and realized why the back garden seemed so different; it was studded with rectangles of newly turned soil—all graves.
Glykeria made a stifled sound; the guerrilla stopped digging and reached for the gun that lay on the ground. But she was already running as fast as her legs could carry her toward the Haidis house. When she got inside, she guiltily picked up a broom and began sweeping the front steps, but her face and her unwonted industry gave her away. Eleni studied her, then said, “All right, troublemaker! What have you been up to now?”
At first the girl protested weakly, then the whole story came out in a rush. Eleni pressed her lips together until there was a white rim around them, a habit she had when she was upset.
“I was lonesome for our house, so I went to visit it,” said Glykeria, near tears. “But they’re killing and burying people in our yard, Mana! I’ll never go back there again!”
Eleni felt violated. The irony of it made her nauseated. She had forfeited her family’s chances to leave the village ahead of the guerrillas in order to stay and protect that house, and now it had been turned into a prison, a killing ground. With the desecration of her home, she felt her last emotional tie to the village dissolve.
By the time spring set the Judas trees ablaze, executions were as much a part of village life as propaganda meetings had once been. The villagers plowed their fields and tended their crops and looked the other way. After all, only captured soldiers and strangers were being killed. In a civil war it was wisest not to inquire into such affairs, nor to tamper with the workings of the people’s justice.
Only the children paid close attention to the executions, considering it a new form of entertainment. Nikola was not allowed to leave the yard, so he didn’t understand where the bound, beaten prisoners that often passed by on the path were going, but other, less well supervised children quickly learned where they could hide to get a good view of the proceedings.
Only trials of important persons and those with propaganda value were held in the public square. Most executions were carried out in a much more summary way, with no witnesses other than the guerrillas involved and the children peeking from their hiding places. Many of the soldiers captured during the Pergamos campaign were executed in the cemetery behind the razed Church of the Virgin, at the southernmost boundary of the village,
just before the mountain made a sharp drop toward the foothills below.
The children who lived in the few houses around the church would find vantage points high enough on the hillside so that the guerrillas couldn’t drive them off by throwing stones. There they would cheer, hiss and boo like spectators at a football match as the condemned soldiers were forced to dig their own graves, then stand next to them to be shot. George Ziaras, the seven-year-old son of the tinker Lukas Ziaras, watched nearly every day with his six-year-old sister Olympia. George recalls that most of the prisoners died calling for their mother, but one imaginative soldier used his last second to scream: “Uncle Leonidas!” In the stunned silence that followed, as the guerrillas looked at one another in surprise, the prisoner catapulted himself over the precipice in front of him and rolled out of sight to safety down the mountain. Of all the executions George Ziaras watched, that was his favorite.
Although Eleni tried to shield her children from knowledge of the killings going on around them, she didn’t succeed. One day Kanta was sent out to graze the goats along with her friend Olympia Barkas and her family’s flock. They took the path toward Babouri and let the animals wander down a ravine halfway between the two villages. Chattering away, the two girls walked with their eyes on the ground looking for the wild violet-blue tassel hyacinth and its white bulbous root, which they called “turtledove’s bread” because in the spring the birds pecked the tubers out of the ground. The villagers could wring nourishment out of dozens of wild plants: every part of the dandelion could be eaten; acorns and even pine cones were considered a delicacy. The white root called “turtledove’s bread” was one of Kanta’s favorite treats, and she was hungry.
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