Walking with her eyes on the ground, the girl noticed a loose pile of rocks and stopped, paralyzed by what she saw. A human hand and arm projected from it. Kanta leaned down and frantically pulled up one flat rock and then another.
The woman in the red-bordered tunic was rigid in death, her arms spread open as if to embrace the sky, her eyes wide, her lips drawn back into a grimace of terror. Kanta felt the thin saliva in her mouth that meant she was going to vomit. She turned to scream for Olympia, who was following the goats. Then she saw another body; a young girl lying with her head on one shoulder as if asleep, the aureole of her wavy hair glinting copper in the sunlight, her skin still pale-pink. She looked like a sleeping child, and Kanta involuntarily reached out and touched her cheek, then jerked her hand back. The body was warm. She found her voice. “Olympia! Olympia!” she screamed. By the time her friend was close enough to see the two bodies she was screaming too, but Kanta had regained her senses. She crouched over the body of the girl. “Hush!” she hissed at Olympia. “That one’s dead but this one is still alive! We’ve got to get help!”
A rustling in the bushes nearby made them both spin around with a shriek. Slowly two guerrillas who had been hiding there rose, their rifles pointed at Kanta and Olympia. Without a word they motioned with the gun barrels, signaling them to move on.
Kanta stood up, still feeling the warmth of the girl’s cheek on her fingertips. She looked at Olympia, then both girls bolted toward home as if pursued, forgetting all about the animals grazing below. As soon as they were out of sight, they heard a shot.
When Kanta burst into the house and described what she had just seen, Eleni sat down on the floor and covered her face with her hands. The image flashed into her mind of the mother and daughter she had glimpsed in the yard of the police station talking to the guerrillas. She thought they were only inquiring about a prisoner, but they must have been prisoners themselves, and what she saw in the courtyard must have been their trial. Eleni remembered the way the girl had held her mother’s hand so trustingly. Rage filled her, and a sick helplessness. She never thought it would go this far. She had believed what Christos wrote her, that the guerrillas were fellow Greeks fighting for their rights who would not harm her family. To appease them and protect her children she had given up her house, her belongings and food, she had sent her daughter to be an andartina and gone every day on the assigned work details, all the time being careful not to say anything that could be construed as criticism of the DAG. She had believed that submission, no matter how bitter, would protect her family from harm. But now they were killing women and children! No one in the village was safe.
The memory of the woman in the tunic and her red-headed daughter reproached her. “Let’s go back and find them,” Eleni said to Kanta, standing up. “Perhaps they’re still alive. We can’t just leave them there!”
Kanta’s eyes were hard, unsettling in a child’s face. “Even if they were alive then, they’re dead now,” she said with heartbreaking logic. “There’s nothing we can do. I just wish I hadn’t touched her.”
Ever since Pergamos, the guerrillas had been expecting another attack, and on March 30 it came. This time the nationalist troops called it Operation Falcon and again planned a pincer movement centering on Lia. As soon as the sound and smoke of the battle moved into the valley below her, Eleni allowed herself to hope; this time the family were all together in the Haidis house, and if the soldiers came anywhere near the village boundaries, they were ready to flee. But the guerrillas had planted their mine fields and fortifications well, and the attacking soldiers never advanced any farther than the foothills below the Mourgana. The battle lasted for seven days; the nationalist soldiers suffering three times as many casualties as the guerrillas. As they inched forward toward Lia, 267 soldiers were wounded or killed, and on April 5, Operation Falcon was abandoned in defeat.
Although the fighting never reached the village, one inhabitant of Lia died as a result of Operation Falcon. The victim was Tsavena, the aged mother of Eleni’s former neighbor Marina Kolliou.
As the nationalist artillery battered the Perivoli from the Great Ridge in the distance, Tsavena, who was ill, fell into an exhausted sleep in the small room off her daughter’s kitchen while Marina and Tsavena’s granddaughter, Olga Venetis, tried to calm Olga’s two little boys. After dark the women were startled by the sound of guerrillas pounding on their door. The andartes announced that they needed the house for the night to billet some of the reinforcements expected to arrive from Macedonia. Everyone had to clear out immediately.
“What am I supposed to do with my mother?” asked Marina Kolliou. “Make her sleep on the ground? She’s ninety years old and has a bad heart.”
“We don’t care what you do. Take her by the leg and throw her into the ravine!” the guerrilla replied. “Just get her out of here.”
Marina wanted to carry the old woman on her back down to a neighbor’s house, but Olga insisted it would kill her grandmother if she was taken out into the hail of mortar shells and the cold night air. She suggested that they just lock the small room where Tsavena was sleeping and leave her there until morning, when they would come back for her. The guerrillas would never know she was there.
It might have worked, but when the guerrilla reinforcements arrived from Macedonia long after midnight, exhausted and impatient for rest, they began pounding on the windows as well as the door. The old woman woke up to see satanic, dirt-streaked, bearded faces peering through the glass, shouting and cursing, trying to break in. She screamed for her daughter but no one answered her cries. When Marina and Olga found her in the morning, Tsavena was lying on the floor paralyzed. She died before the day was over, while the guerrillas celebrated their victorious defeat of the fascists around her body.
With a heavy heart, Eleni climbed up to the Perivoli to attend her neighbor’s funeral as the bull horns caroled the great victory. When the battle began Eleni had allowed herself to hope that the government soldiers might reach high enough for the family to flee. Now she was convinced there would never be another chance. The guerrillas seemed entrenched forever, too well fortified for the walls of their citadel to be breached.
Eleni listened to the funeral dirges lamenting Tsavena’s death. It wasn’t two months ago that Fotini had come to her in a dream and told her to get ready; she was taking Tsavena first, then returning for her. Now Tsavena had set out on the journey to Charon, and Eleni couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that her own destiny was beginning to unwind, fulfilling her mother-in-law’s words.
Suspicion and fear infected every home in the village, making next-door neighbors and even relatives wary of what they said to one another. Eleni was not immune to the general paranoia, and when she received an unexpected visit one morning in April from Spiro Michopoulos, fear made her hands tremble and her voice sound hollow as she greeted him.
Eleni had always sympathized with the young coffeehouse owner before the guerrillas made him village president, and she regretted the way the villagers ostracized him because of his brush with tuberculosis. To Eleni, Spiro Michopoulos had always been polite and soft-spoken, excessively eager to please. But she knew that such people often harbored hostility toward neighbors who had been treated better by life.
As he sat in the chair Eleni brought out on the veranda, his long, thin legs awkwardly akimbo, idly clicking his chain of worry beads, Michopoulos looked depressed. But then, thought Eleni, he always looked that way. There were permanent furrows between his eyes; his sallow face was a long, mournful inverted triangle with swept-back dark hair receding at the temples. Although his features were regular, Spiro’s outsized ears and tiny toothbrush of a mustache gave him a slightly clownish look. But today he appeared far more sinister than comical to Eleni, and his visit seemed a bad omen.
She hid her nervousness in the bustle of bringing him some warm milk, then sat down opposite him. “Are you all right, Spiro?” she ventured. “You look like you lost a sovereign and found a drachm
a.”
His thin chest rose and fell with a deep sigh and he shook his head mournfully. “The andartes keep asking me to give them more people for work details, more mules, more supplies, but the villagers want to stay home to protect their families and their fields,” he said. “I understand how both sides feel, but I always get caught between the upper and the lower millstones.” He seemed to droop. “I’ve tried to be fair.
“I know, Spiro,” Eleni replied, wondering what he was leading up to.
“But people don’t want me to be fair!” he burst out. “They want their neighbor, who’s disloyal to the cause, to be assigned more work than they have. And of course everyone is more dedicated to the cause than his neighbor.”
That must be it, Eleni thought. Because her father was a royalist and her husband an American, the villagers were complaining that she should be assigned more work as punishment. She tried to read Michopoulos’ face, but he was staring out toward the horizon in a melancholy that reached to his fingertips. He turned the cup of milk around in his hands and began talking in a low voice, as if to himself. “At the beginning, when we were fighting foreign invaders it was so simple, and so … right,” he said. “Now it’s all changed.”
He fell silent. Eleni was sure he was trying to trick her into saying something critical about the guerrillas, and didn’t reply.
“It’s going to get worse!” he shouted, abruptly turning on her. “The village is not safe anymore! There’ll be more attacks, more bloodshed. I don’t want to see parents weeping for their children.”
Eleni couldn’t understand why he sounded so urgent and excited. He took a deep breath, collected himself, then said, “It was wise that you moved out of the Perivoli, Eleni. But even here it’s not safe.” He searched her face. “You should go farther down, Eleni! Go down as far as you can. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”
She stared at him, wondering why he was acting so strangely. Was he telling her to move down to the bottom of the village to live with her sister-in-law, farther away from the guerrilla emplacements which would receive the brunt of the enemy fire, or did he mean something else? As she was pondering how to ask him without saying something compromising, he wiped his mustache, leaped to his feet, nervously thanked her for the untouched cup of milk and left. After he was gone Eleni wondered fleetingly if he had been trying to tell her to flee the village altogether, but then she returned to her original conviction that his visit had been an attempt to trap her into saying something against the guerrillas.
In early April the bull horn of the town crier broadcast a summons that spread excitement through the village: “All mothers who have children between the ages of three and fourteen are to report to the Church of the Holy Trinity at once!”
The women hurried toward the town square, whispering questions about what it could mean. The rumor went around that there would be a distribution of food to families with small children. Nikola and Fotini were young enough to qualify, Eleni calculated. Any extra ration of sugar, lard or flour would be a godsend.
In contrast to the warmth of the bright spring day, the dark interior of the church was musty and cool. Ever since Father Theodoros fled the village, there had been no services. The icons and the bishop’s seat were shrouded in dust, but the women entering the church, many carrying babies, automatically made their cross and stopped to kiss the image of the Virgin inside. By habit, they crowded into the women’s section in the back, but a small dark woman, a young andartina in uniform with a bandolier of bullets across her chest, motioned the women to come forward. It seemed a good omen that they were to be addressed by a woman.
“Mothers of Lia,” she shouted. “We’ve called you together because your children are in danger.”
The church became very quiet. Someone shushed a crying baby. “The fascist attacks on this village will continue,” the andartina said. “If your children are not hit by a bullet or a bomb, they will die slowly of starvation. You know that there’s not even enough food left for our fighters. You’ve all heard your children crying with hunger.”
The women stared at her. They knew that it was true enough, but what did she expect them to do about it? When was she going to get to the part about more food?
“Your children are the reason for our struggle, to make a better Greece for them,” the woman soldier shrilled. “You have to share our ordeal, but it’s not fair to make them suffer too. Because of the party’s great concern and love for your children, our leaders have found a way to save them.”
She paused dramatically. “We’ve called you here to announce that the people’s democracies, including our neighbors Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria have opened their arms to your children! They will take all children whose parents sign this piece of paper, care for them, feed them well, give them new clothes and educate them to become doctors, engineers, officers—whatever their abilities permit. And when the war is ended and the Red Flag flies over all of our country, they will return to you, tall, healthy and happy, ready to take their places in the new Greece.”
It took a moment or two for the village women to comprehend what the andartina was saying. They exchanged startled looks and unconsciously pulled toddlers closer to their sides. She was standing in front of them with a smile on her face and asking them to hand over their children to be taken away! The women stared at the piece of paper in her hand as if it were a snake.
The andartina didn’t seem to notice the reaction. She plunged on enthusiastically. “I want each one of you to step forward and give me your children’s names and ages. In a month or so they’ll be taken to their new life, free from danger, fear and hunger. Now, who will be first?”
The dark interior of the church, under the glowering eyes of Christ the Ail-Powerful on the dome, began to seem intolerably close. Eleni forced herself to stay calm. Her children were safe at home with Nitsa and Megali, and this young woman was only asking for volunteers. Being young and unmarried, she didn’t know what it meant to have a child, didn’t realize what she was asking. After a while, when none volunteered their children, she would see her mistake and let them go home. The main thing, Eleni told herself, was to remain quiet, not to anger the guerrillas or call attention to herself.
Tassina Bartzokis, next to her, learned over and whispered, “If all of us say ‘No’ with one voice, what can they do?”
Eleni gave a small shake of her head.
The young woman at the front of the church saw the movement. “Why are you hesitating?” she asked. “Is there anyone or anything holding you back?”
Olga Venetis’ voice answered her. “Only our pain for our children,” she said. “Nothing else.”
The andartina forced herself to be patient. “You mustn’t cling to your children and let them be killed out of selfish bourgeois sentiment!” she scolded. “Would you rather see them die here or live happily in safety?” She arranged her face again into a smile. “Now I’m going to ask each of you individually,” she said. “Who will show the rest the right decision?”
Nearest her was Xantho Venetis, the wife of the cooper, who was holding her three-year-old son. “Comrade Xantho, will you give your children the chance for a life without fear?”
The gaunt woman spoke without thinking. “None of us will give up our children!” There was a gasp; Xantho had rashly presumed to speak for the whole group. The andartina studied her, then wrote something down on a piece of paper. Xantho swallowed, imagining it was her death sentence.
The women waited, hoping that Xantho’s defiance would not unleash the guerrillas’ wrath on all of them. A loud sob broke the silence and they turned to see Calliope Bardaka pushing forward through the crowd. The women exchanged knowing looks. As the security police’s chief informant, Calliope was universally suspected of sleeping with the guerrillas.
“I’m the first!” Calliope wept. “My husband was killed by fascists and I won’t let the same thing happen to my children. I want to be the first mother to place them under the prote
ction of our party.”
She came forward, wiping her eyes. The young andartina put an arm around her shoulders as she wrote down the names of Calliope’s two children and showed her where to make her mark.
As Calliope returned to her place, another voice rang out, ragged with desperation: “Take my children, all but the baby!” The women looked around and saw that the speaker was Nakova Daflaki, the last person they would have expected to step forward. Nakova’s husband had been a member of the home guard, MAY, who fled at the approach of the guerrillas to escape certain execution. The DAG took revenge by throwing Nakova and her four small children out of their house and confiscating all their food. Since then, they had been sleeping in a hay shed. Nakova was often seen scavenging in the dirt of the guerrilla’s stables for individual kernels of corn dropped from the horses’ feed troughs. Now she was handing over her children to the very men who had been persecuting her.
After Nakova signed the paper, there was a strained silence, broken only by the sobs of the two women who had volunteered. “These unselfish comrades have led the way,” said the andartina. “Who will follow?”
The women shifted from one foot to the other, watching the speaker become more impatient. Finally she said, “I want you all to go home and think hard about what is best for your children. If you truly love them, you’ll let them go.”
Walking out of the church, the women pointedly avoided the two who had signed over their children. Nakova Daflaki was still weeping as she reached the door and blinked in the sunlight. She looked imploringly at the silent women and saw Eleni staring at her with mingled pity and horror.
“What else could I do?” she cried out in desperation. “We sleep in a hay shed! I have nothing to feed them! I can’t just watch them die, can I?”
Eleni Page 37
