The prisoners were filthy and covered with lice. They were led in a group to the outhouse once or twice a day, but not frequently enough to control their bladders, so the stench in the cellar was suffocating. Once a day, tin plates of a thin soup were passed through the small barred windows by neighborhood women who had been ordered to prepare it. Olga Venetis recalls handing forty-five portions of soup into the cellar one day, but the number of prisoners varied drastically as some were taken out to be executed and others were brought in from distant villages.
Almost every evening Sotiris, Zeltas and other security police would come into the basement and choose a prisoner to kick and beat in front of the rest. Spiro Michopoulos and Vasili Nikou were often the ones they chose, though all the while they were being thrashed the men cried that they were innocent, completely loyal to the guerrillas.
When the day arrived for a prisoner to be executed, he would be called out of the basement in the evening, led upstairs and never be seen again. The sound of machine-gun fire regularly shattered the sleep of the Perivoli as Marina Kolliou peered from her window into the languorous summer night, memorizing the location of another grave plot.
A few of their fellow prisoners remain vivid in the memories of Dina Venetis and Marianthe. One of them was a madman, a half-witted shepherd who had been arrested for allegedly carrying messages to the government soldiers, even though he could not even speak intelligibly. When the guerrillas beat and kicked him, he would babble frantically in an incomprehensible gibberish, bubbles of spit forming at the edges of his mouth and running onto his filthy clothes.
There were bearded priests in the cellar, and an old whiskered patriarch who had been arrested when the guerrillas came searching for his soldier son in a village near the Kalamas River. Although the prisoners were not permitted to talk to each other, watched constantly by guards peering from the trap door in the ceiling and outside the cellar door and windows, they managed to exchange whispers with those sitting next to them. Dina Venetis remembers a slight young woman from the village of Gribovo, “a mere wisp of a girl,” named Sofia Mitrou. She was teased constantly by the guards because she wound her kerchief around her face in the old-fashioned way, like Eleni’s daughters.
Sofia had been arrested when the guerrillas came to her house searching for her father, a priest whom she loved with the filial devotion of an Electra. Dina felt a special pity for the girl, whom the security police decided to beat one night in front of the others, throwing her down and kicking her with cleated boots until the rest thought she was dead. Later Sofia huddled against Dina and consoled herself, “At least my father got away.”
One night both Dina and Sofia had strange dreams; in the morning they told them to each other in whispers. Dina had imagined herself weaving at a loom, sending the shuttle back and forth. Sofia’s dream was of rolling up string into a ball but she ran out of string when the ball was still tiny. No matter how she searched, she couldn’t find any more. Like most village women, Sofia was expert at drawing omens from dreams. “Yours means that you’re going to be set free,” Sofia told Dina with a sad smile. “My dream means that my life is over.” That night they took Sofia out of the cellar and she did not return.
Both Marianthe Ziaras and Dina Venetis have indelible memories of a prisoner named Despo, a tall, striking young woman of thirty with curly black hair who had been arrested near her evacuated village of Mavronoron when she tried to sneak back into her house to get some food. In the cellar prison Despo kept crying for her two baby sons. The beatings had begun to affect her mind and she lived in a delirium of fear, unable to bear the thought of the bullet that would kill her. She talked to herself all night long, weeping and bargaining with death. One night Despo’s hand came in contact with a long nail stuck into one of the rough beams of the cellar. She managed to work it loose, a rusty skewer nearly six inches long. With a convulsive movement she grasped it between her bound hands and plunged it deep into her belly, just below the rib cage.
Despo’s suicide attempt was a failure. Despite the deep puncture wound, she couldn’t die but remained conscious, begging the guards for help—a bandage, something to kill the pain—but they mocked her. The sound of her moans kept the other prisoners awake and it was almost a relief when Despo was taken upstairs one evening, along with the white-bearded old man. As she realized that her ultimate fear was coming true, Despo filled the building with screams, clearly audible in the cellar below: “You’re going to kill me! I know it!” Then they could hear the sardonic voice of Katis replying, “Would we kill Despo, our pampered one, our favorite?” Over the sound of her sobbing they heard him add, “You must write to General Markos tomorrow for clemency. He may give you a reprieve.”
Then the scornful voice of the bearded old man was heard. “Clemency!” he snorted. “Clemency! You’re going to kill me, but you’re not going to make a fool of me!”
Later that night the prisoners heard the shots that ended Despo’s agony.
When a guerrilla would come into the cellar in the evening and call a prisoner’s name to take him upstairs, the others heaved an involuntary sigh of relief. They might be beaten, lice-infested, starving, covered in their own filth, unable to speak aloud or to move their hands, but they were to be spared for one more day. Except for Alexo Gatzoyiannis, they clung to hope, waiting for a reprieve, a rescue or some kind of miracle.
Eighteen-year-old Marianthe Ziaras had her unwavering religious faith to sustain her. She was beaten often, once thrown against a wooden chest in the upstairs room so hard that several ribs cracked. Her feet and legs swelled from the beatings until her shoes no longer fit, but her belief in a miracle never waned. And one evening, some days before the Virgin’s feast day, she had a dream.
Every Greek village has several women who are considered particularly holy, endowed with the ability to exorcise the evil eye, read omens and detect signs of impending doom in the face of the household icon. Marianthe was one of these favored women, and no one, least of all herself, thought it extraordinary for the Virgin to appear to her.
Marianthe dreamed that she was weeping, her head on her knee, repeating over and over, “Mother of God, save me!” when, as she tells it, “I felt a tear fall on my arm. As I looked at it, it shimmered and turned white. Then I heard a voice say, ‘Enough now! You’ve cracked my heart with your prayers.’ I raised my head and there by the door was the Virgin, all alive, glowing with light. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ She said. And from that moment I knew I was going to be saved.”
That evening Marianthe’s name was called and she was led upstairs under the pitying eyes of the other prisoners. When the guards brought her to the first floor, they tightened the rope around her hands so that it cut off the circulation and the girl cried, “If you were Germans, you wouldn’t hurt me so much! Can’t you loosen it?” One of the guards took pity on her and did as she asked. Then she was pushed into the small, dark, dirt-floored pantry behind the kitchen where Eleni had been kept, but Eleni was no longer there.
Marianthe fell into the room amid a clatter of pots and pans, and as soon as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness she realized that Andreas Michopoulos was huddled in a corner, also with his hands bound. He had been beaten badly; his eyes were dark and swollen, his face bloody and terrible.
Marianthe sat in silence, taking in her surroundings. There was one small window, about two feet square, with two vertical iron bars embedded in the wooden window frame. The bars were old; every window in Lia was fortified in this way, a practice dating back to the days of the brigands.
The tiny room contained a large pile of shoes which Marianthe realized must have belonged to prisoners who had been killed. After falanga—the widespread torture of beating on the soles of the feet—shoes could no longer be worn. Marianthe’s beatings had caused her feet to swell, but she still had her shoes with her, tucked under her arm. She was determined not to lose them, even in her last extremity, because they were fine black leather ones, almost new, that
her father had bought for her.
Marianthe and Andreas regarded each other in silence, both certain that they had been brought upstairs to be executed. They could hear the guards breathing just outside the door. There were other sounds—the snorting of the horses tied below the window, the laughter of guerrillas playing cards in a nearby room, and a constant clatter among the pots and pans within the small pantry. “I don’t know if it was mice or the spirits of those who had been killed,” Marianthe says now, “but the pots and pans never stopped rattling. That helped us a lot because the guards couldn’t hear what we said.”
Marianthe twisted at the ropes on her hands until the skin of her wrists was blistered, but she eventually got one hand free, then the other. She went over to Andreas and untied his hands as well. “They’re going to kill us,” she whispered. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“And go where?” he answered incredulously. “Through the ceiling? If they catch us, they’ll do worse than kill us!”
Marianthe had never liked Andreas, who had been in her grade in the village school. She considered him a braggart and a coward for implicating so many other villagers. His doglike acceptance of his fate irked her. She was convinced that her dream meant she was to escape.
“We’re dead anyway!” she hissed. “Give me your belt.”
Andreas painfully loosened the webbed canvas belt from his bloodied uniform and handed it to her. Marianthe looped the end of it around one of the bars, embedded in the old window frame, and commanded Andreas to help her pull. With a crunch of breaking wood the bar came loose, leaving a gap of more than twelve inches. Andreas and Marianthe stood stunned for a moment, then the boy, despite his wounds, slithered through the hole. He was thin and he pushed through easily, tumbling out of sight. It was a steep drop to the ground, and Andreas landed in a pile of garbage. Marianthe winced at the sound of the fall and the moan that escaped Andreas as he landed, but nothing happened. She pushed a box under the window and tried to climb through, but she was much stouter than Andreas and became wedged in. Breathing hard, she planted her feet on the box beneath her, braced her hands on either side of the window and gave a great push, which dislodged the whole window casement with Marianthe still stuck in it. With a cry she fell into the garbage. Painfully, she stood up and freed herself from the window frame.
Andreas stood dazed as if waiting for directions. Marianthe held her breath, but no one came after them. Suddenly she remembered her shoes, which she had left behind. For reasons Marianthe still can’t explain, she went back for them, making Andreas boost her up until she could climb into the empty window hole. After she re-emerged with the shoes under her arm, they crouched in the shadows for a few moments, listening to the voices of the guerrillas inside. Then Marianthe grasped Andreas’ hand and they began to run through the shadows across the fields. It was almost dawn. As the sky began to lighten in the east, the two took refuge in a tiny storage shack in a field near the southeast corner of the village, where they burrowed under a pile of newly harvested ears of corn.
The disappearance of the pair was discovered near dawn by the astounded guerrillas, setting off much shouting and running about, all audible to the prisoners below. The head of the security police, Christos Zeltas, frantically ordered every villager able to walk to join in the search for the teen-agers. By 6 A.M. the whole village was outside beating the bushes in frightened groups while the guerrillas fired shots into dense trees and haystacks trying to flush out the fugitives. Hearing the commotion all around them, Andreas and Marianthe spent the entire day hiding under the dusty, sweltering pile of corn, nearly delirious from thirst and heat. After darkness fell that night they crept out of their hiding place and parted company, Andreas heading toward his parents’ house below the Alonia, and Marianthe going toward the house of her grandmother near the Church of St. Friday.
Marianthe knocked at her grandmother’s door, hoping to get a change of clothes, for her red wool skirt would attract the searchers’ eyes like a signal flare, but the old woman peered out the door and hissed, “Run, child, quickly! They’re everywhere around looking for you!”
“At least give me some bread!” Marianthe pleaded, but her grandmother snapped, “I won’t give you anything. Get out of here!”
Weeping, Marianthe ran back to the shack full of corn for lack of anywhere else to go, but someone must have seen her, for within minutes after she burrowed back to the very bottom of the pile she heard guerrillas firing their guns in the darkness and shouting, “Marianthe, come out! We know you’re here! If you come out nothing will happen to you, but if we have to find you, you’ll wish you’d never been born!”
A pair of guerrillas even opened the door of the tiny shed in which she was hiding and looked in, but as Marianthe braced herself for a bullet, they closed the door and sat down outside, leaning against it. They stayed there for the rest of the night while Marianthe listened to every word they said and prayed to the Virgin that the dust of the corn wouldn’t make her sneeze. Curled into a ball deep under the corn, she had no idea when it became light, but after many hours she heard church bells. “Let’s go,” she heard one of the guerrillas say. “Either she’s gotten away or one of the bullets has found her.”
When they were gone, Marianthe crept out of the shed. She hadn’t eaten or slept for forty-eight hours. She saw a path and prayed: “Mother of God, let this lead me to the Great Ridge.”
She walked for six hours without being seen, and passed two rotting corpses among the roots of trees—whether the bodies of guerrillas or soldiers she couldn’t tell as she turned away from their eyeless faces grinning at her. When she finally emerged at the Great Ridge and hailed the nationalist soldiers camped on its summit, they refused to believe that the girl wasn’t an andartina. They made her advance with her arms over her head, still clutching her shoes.
The first three soldiers she reached stared at her in astonishment. “Why are you carrying your shoes instead of wearing them?” they asked.
Marianthe couldn’t find her voice to answer and stood there dumb, tears pouring down her cheeks. She finally managed to say that she was the daughter of Lukas Ziaras and had escaped from the guerrillas’ jail in Lia. The soldiers found it incredible that anyone, and a girl to boot, could do such a thing. Marianthe held out her arms, showing the burns and blisters of the ropes that had bound her for so many days that the flesh was gray. “My hands are my witnesses,” she said.
They finally believed her, and one of the soldiers reached out to take the shoes clutched in her hand. She had been holding them for so long that she couldn’t let go and they had to pry her fingers open.
A search party of village women found Andreas Michopoulos crouching in a field near his house, devouring a cucumber that he had stolen, nearly mad from hunger and thirst. Xantho Stamou, the first woman to see him hiding behind a bush, hesitated for a moment under his pleading gaze. But several months before, Xantho had been arrested, beaten and interrogated herself on charges of encouraging young women in her husband’s nearby village to escape; and as she stood there, uncertain about what to do, she thought that it could mean her own death if she didn’t sound the alarm. She stared back at Andreas’ swollen red eyes in his gray face, the sagging jaw, the half-eaten cucumber frozen halfway to his mouth. The ragged boy trembled as if he had a fever and shook his head beseechingly. Xantho raised her hand and pointed. “It’s Andreas Michopoulos!” she screamed to the other women. “Come quick! I’ve found him!”
Eleni, now being held in the kitchen, heard the outburst of activity among the guerrillas when the escape was discovered. Like the prisoners in the basement she listened to the shouts and gunfire that rang through the village for the next day and night, torn between hope that the fugitives would get away and terror that the remaining captives would be made to pay for their flight.
On the second morning after their disappearance, Eleni watched from the kitchen window as Andreas Michopoulos was dragged between several guerrillas back throug
h the gates of the security headquarters, his feet trailing in the dust.
The guerrillas made sure that all the prisoners witnessed Andreas’ punishment. In the front yard, in clear view of the cellar and kitchen windows, they stripped him naked and tied him to a log, the way a sheep or goat would be trussed for roasting. They suspended the log between two notched supports so that they could turn the boy’s body around, as a goat is turned to be basted. Then his former comrades took turns beating Andreas with wooden sticks, turning him this way and that to find spots which were not already livid with bruises. When their arms tired, they left him there in the August sun, and soon his body was black. His tongue was protruding from his mouth, but he was still making sounds. He moaned like an ox, covered with blood which clotted his hair and mixed with the mucus running from his nose and mouth.
Eleni tried not to look or listen to the young guerrilla’s punishment, but she was constantly drawn to the window with a perverse fascination. She could feel the impact of the wooden rods on his bare flesh and could see the skin puffing. She prayed that he would die.
She lingered at the window when the sun began to set, shadows mercifully creeping over the shape suspended in her yard. In the distance the mountains shone as a soft yellow cloud spread its wings above the sunset until it blazed up into the color of autumn leaves.
She continued to stand there as the light ebbed and died and a full August moon slowly rose above the cypress trees around the churchyard of St. Demetrios. The azure sky paled and the purple shadows of the trees crept like fingers over the immobile body on the spit while the foothills in the distance were bathed with a cold luminousness. Between the slender forms of the cypresses, an infinity of stars winked at her like jasmine blossoms. A heavy silence hung over the world.
Eleni Page 51
