Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  It probably took a few days of concentrated torture before Eleni was completely broken to the point where she not only confessed to hiding Olga’s dowry and other valuables in the bean field but agreed with every accusation Katis made against her. The first time the village saw her again was several days after the trial. What emerged from the cellar prison was a far different figure from the self-contained woman, her features composed beneath the dark kerchief, who had parried Katis’ questions.

  Tassina Bartzokis was at her kitchen window when she saw Eleni being led out of the prison gate on a mule, leaning heavily against the back of the wooden saddle. Tassina’s eyes widened in horror at the sight of her closest friend, whom she could scarcely recognize. Eleni’s hair was no longer covered with a kerchief, but hung loose and unkempt, like that of women performing penance on the Virgin’s feast day. Her dress, which had always been modestly buttoned up to her neck, was open, exposing a V of white flesh mottled with bruises. Her legs, swollen to freakish dimensions, were naked and wrapped in rags. She could barely sit erect on the wooden saddle, but when Tassina came out into the yard to look closer, Eleni met her eyes with a flicker of recognition. Three guerrillas preceded the mule, one carrying a shovel, another a pick; and two riderless packhorses followed behind. At this sight Tassina felt fear wash through her stomach and into her bowels.

  Farther down the path at the bottom of the Perivoli another close friend, Angeliki Botsaris Daikos, saw the procession passing by. Consumed with curiosity about what was being done to her neighbor, she took an empty barrel as if to gather water from the spring below, and circling around, came toward the Haidis house from the back.

  A third woman who remembers the event was Ourania Haidis. She was married to one of Eleni’s cousins, but when she saw her kinswoman passing by, Ourania and her mother-in-law hid, watching the proceedings from behind their shutters, too frightened to show themselves.

  The only neighbor who had the courage to come over and ask what was happening was Vasiliki Petsis. She came out of her yard and over to the Haidis gate, where the procession had come to a halt. Eleni never got down from the saddle—her legs were far too swollen for her to walk. She only sat there and pointed toward the Haidis bean field. “It’s there, under the patch of dry beans,” she said to the guerrillas in an unnatural voice. Vasiliki recalled the day, during the time Eleni was released from the prison and living alone, that she had asked her why she neglected to irrigate that particular patch of beans. “Why bother?” was Eleni’s laconic reply. “Who’s going to live to eat them?”

  Now, while the guerrillas dug at the spot with their shovel and pick, ripping up the parched bean plants, Vasiliki crept close to where Eleni was sitting on the mule, her chin on her chest, her back propped against the backrest of the saddle.

  “Eleni, child!” Vasiliki whispered. The prisoner raised her head and her eyes focused on her neighbor with difficulty. Slowly she lifted a trembling hand and gestured for her to leave. It was difficult to understand the words that issued from the swollen, cracked lips. “Go,” Vasiliki heard her say, “or they’ll do the same to you.” But the older woman hung around long enough to see what the guerrillas unearthed: several large copper pots full of clothing, linens and velenzes—Olga’s cherished dowry.

  The guerrillas fell to their knees and scrabbled among the contents of the pots, pulling everything out on the ground. Their faces fell as they realized that the clothing and linens were all rotten, covered with a gray-green mold, the fabrics falling apart in their hands. Somehow, water had seeped through and as they pulled each object out, they threw it away in disgust.

  The guerrillas fumbled through the mess and shouted as they found solid objects; perhaps the treasure Sotiris had told them about. But it was only some copper pots and pans, a corroded pitcher and a framed photograph that was no longer recognizable. They cheered as they unearthed some tins of canned meat and powdered milk. Angeliki Botsaris, hiding nearby with her empty water barrel, crept closer to see what Eleni had hidden. She remembers the guerrillas spreading on the ground some “American towels, like nothing we had ever seen, thick, with flowers on them. And there was even a jar of honey.”

  “You can see what the fascist traitor has hidden away, what wealth!” the head of the guerrillas shouted to the silent, watching windows of the nearby houses. They made a great show of gathering up the things, but clearly they were disappointed; they had hoped to find a treasure and had come up with only some mildewed blankets and linens. Angrily they packed all the goods on the backs of two horses, to take them up to the commissary, where they were carefully spread out in the yard so that everyone in the village could see what the Amerikana had buried in her garden. The mule with the prisoner on it was led at the head of the parade of plunder in a slow procession back up the path to the Perivoli.

  Eleni Gatzoyiannis, expressionless and slumped in the saddle, passed before the horrified and fascinated eyes of her neighbors as she was led back into the cellar of her house.

  During the last seven days, the anchor that Eleni used to keep her tenuous grip on sanity was her thoughts of her children. Shortly after the trial, probably when she was brought up to the good chamber in preparation for the first round of torture, she found a way to leave a message that would reach them after she was dead, her only written testament.

  Eleni was left alone for a brief time in the good chamber, which had been the show place of her home before it was made into an office for the security police. Her eyes automatically sought the iconostasis, which hung in the eastern corner. It was a glass-fronted triangular wooden box holding the family’s icons. Eleni had never permitted any of the children to touch it; attending to the iconostasis was her personal duty. She walked up to look at the familiar framed image of the Virgin and Child—the centerpiece of the iconostasis. Inside the small cabinet, before the Virgin, there still sat a red Easter egg, a sprig of laurel from the Palm Sunday mass, and a small bottle of water blessed by the priest on Epiphany. Around the edge were tucked a half-dozen small cardboard images of saints and holy figures, each one purchased many years ago in Filiates or Yannina to commemorate some special blessing or feast day.

  Eleni stared into the Virgin’s face, her heart tight with worry about her children. She knew she was to die, probably to be buried in some obscure ravine or in her own yard, and she imagined her children returning after the war, searching for her throughout northern Greece and perhaps in the Communist countries. She wanted to tell them her fate and at the same time console them that she was at peace under the protection of the Holy Virgin.

  Suddenly Eleni reached up and pulled out one of the small cardboard icons tucked into the rim of the cabinet. Then she went to the desk used by the police and snatched up a fountain pen. She tried to think what she could write that would tell them she was to be killed and yet not be so incriminating that she would be further punished by the guerrillas if they found it.

  Eleni was holding a small paper icon of a brown-eyed Madonna in scarlet robes, smaller than a playing card; about three inches high and two wide. She turned it over and hurriedly scrawled on the back:

  Sweet Virgin

  protect my mother

  there where

  you are together

  Eleni Ch Gat

  She wrote in bold, firm black strokes, the lines slanting upward in her haste. The letters show that her hand was not yet palsied with the effects of the torture. But because she was hurrying so, she made several mistakes in forming letters, which she swiftly crossed out and wrote over. Those few words took up five lines on the back of the narrow card and she centered her name on a line by itself, the way it would appear on a tombstone.

  Eleni studied what she had written. If they found it, the guerrillas would not realize she had written it about herself, but her children would know her handwriting and understand she was dead. She imagined their tears when they returned to the house for the first time in search of her and discovered her message in the iconostas
is. Then she took the pen and scribbled in ever smaller letters to make it fit:

  Don’t be upset

  I am all right

  In tiny letters below it she signed “Mana.”

  As she began to put the card back in the iconostasis, Eleni thought of Alexo, whose children would also be hunting for their mother, not knowing what had become of her. She scribbled a last line, fitting it in with difficulty around the bottom of what she had already written: “God have mercy also on the soul of Alexandra.”

  Hearing the sound of approaching footsteps, Eleni threw down the pen and ran to the iconostasis, where she opened the glass door and shoved the tiny card behind the large framed icon of the Virgin and Child. She had barely closed it and turned around when the door opened to admit the guerrillas who would administer her torture.

  Pain beyond the limits of endurance destroys the mind as well as the body, driving it to take refuge in madness. Spiro Michopoulos had always been weak, a result of his near-death from tuberculosis, and by the time he died, the torture had reduced him to a slavering, trembling creature, unable to walk or speak. But to his last intelligible breath Michopoulos cried that he had always been loyal to the Democratic Army. Despite the torture, the guerrillas never managed to wring out of the former village president the location of any more hoards of goods besides the chests that had been dug up from the cellar of his house.

  Andreas Michopoulos was more or less left alone, for Katis knew that Andreas’ execution would create no propaganda problem in the village. Ever since his childhood as the village troublemaker, the boy had been unpopular in Lia.

  Alexo Gatzoyiannis, who was at first a source of comfort to the other prisoners in the cellar prison, had long ago given up any hope of survival. To Eleni, her sister-in-law always seemed one of the strongest women in the village, uncomplaining despite her difficult life and many children. During her testimony at the trial, Alexo blazed with defiance and cynicism, but the pain of torture eventually destroyed her mind. Those who saw her during the last days of her life say she seemed oblivious of her surroundings, her eyes blank, recognizing no one.

  The gray-haired cooper Vasili Nikou, a veteran of nine years as a soldier in the Balkan wars, had drunk his life as a cup of gall. The horrors of his military service and the death of his only son had hardened him like a tree on a cliff, constantly battered by the elements. The torture did not destroy Nikou’s sanity nor shake his cynical despair. His daughter Chrysoula, who was twenty-eight at the time, saw him shortly after the trial. Although no other prisoner was permitted visits from their family, Chrysoula was allowed to bring him food, which she had to taste first to prove that it hadn’t been poisoned in order to end her father’s pain. At her request, the cooper was brought to the door of the cellar.

  “His face was swollen and black around the eyes,” Chrysoula remembers, “and on one side his upper lip was puffed up. It must have hurt him to talk, because he spoke so slowly. We embraced, despite the lice crawling all over him, and he tried to put up a brave front. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘Jails are for men. Go home and look after your mother.’ ”

  After this visit, Chrysoula and her younger sister Olga, accompanied by their aunt Fotina Makou, made a pilgrimage to the hills below Tsamanta where Major Spiro Skevis was based as commander of a battalion. They were hoping that they could convince Skevis to intercede with his superior officers on behalf of their father. Nikou’s other sister, who had been sent into Albania with the entire Skevis clan two months earlier, was married to Skevis’ eldest brother, Yiorgos, a tie of kinship that was not taken lightly in a village like Lia.

  When the group reached the shed in the mountains which Spiro Skevis was using as his headquarters, they encountered one of his nieces who was serving as his telephone operator and assistant. The women from Lia demanded to see Skevis, but the girl insisted that the major wasn’t in. “We’re not leaving here until we see him,” Chrysoula insisted.

  The nervous young assistant told her kinswoman to go farther up the hill and she would try to find Skevis. Soon they saw him come out of the shed and climb up toward them.

  As a schoolteacher in Lia, Spiro Skevis had been a tense, emaciated figure, vibrating with fanatic devotion for the resistance movement, but now he was even thinner and paler, and his ill-tended beard and burning eyes gave him the appearance of a maddened scarecrow. As soon as he was within hearing distance of the women, Fotina Makou shouted to Skevis, “Is it true, Spiro, that you’re going to kill my brother?”

  Skevis stared at the three women from his village, two of them his nieces, and grew red with anger and shame. He and his brother Prokopi had begun their resistance organization in Lia during the occupation afire with humanitarian ideals and the longing to bring about equality of all men. They had wanted to eliminate the tyranny of the bloodsucking ruling classes. Now it had degenerated into this: the killing of his own relatives.

  The knowledge was eating at his heart. Skevis had already gone to Koliyiannis to protest the condemnation of the five Liotes and had discovered that his rank of major, despite his brilliant record, carried no power to sway the political commissar. Skevis was sent away in humiliation with the warning to tend to his own business and not to meddle in civilian affairs. Now his feelings of frustration erupted into anger at the petitioners. “We’re going to kill Spiro Michopoulos, who was one of us!” he shouted “Do you think we can spare Vasili Nikou, who has always been a fascist?”

  The older woman began swearing at Skevis, once the pride of the village, universally admired for his learning and his revolutionary ideas. But Skevis swore and shouted even louder than she did. “Leave me alone, for God’s sake!” he cried. “Go away, all of you!” He turned on his heel and strode back to his headquarters while his niece barred the door to her cousins. Silent with despair, the three women set out on the long walk back to Lia.

  The desire of the political commissar to improve the image of the guerrillas and smooth over the bad feelings caused by the trial led to a grotesque incident that occurred a day or so after Eleni was led down to show where she had hidden the “treasures” in the bean field.

  Since their arrival in the village, the guerrillas had forbidden any religious services. But as Angeliki Botsaris Daikos was caring for her baby boy, born four days before the mass escape, there was a great clanging of church bells. The guerrillas announced through their bull horns that there was to be a mass baptism of all newborn babies immediately in the Church of the Holy Trinity on the village square. “All mothers of unbaptized babies, prepare your children at once!”

  About fifteen babies had been born in the village since the guerrillas closed the churches, and their mothers, like Angeliki, were stunned at the announcement. She wondered if it was a new trick of the guerrillas as she searched for something to put on her tiny son. All the baby clothes were in rags, so she took a slip of her own that was still in good condition, left over from her dowry, swiftly cut armholes in the sides and wrapped it around him.

  The fifteen mothers and their crying infants assembled in the village square to see the guerrillas leading toward them an archimandrite, the highest rank a married priest can attain in the church hierarchy. He was a gray-bearded man of about sixty-five whom the guerrillas had been holding prisoner in the same cellar as Eleni. “He was either from the village of Moshini or Parakalamo,” Angeliki recalls, “and he looked very solemn.”

  The guerrillas provided a small cupful of oil to pour into the water of the tarnished baptismal font, and the archimandrite set about intoning the familiar ritual. Confused, every woman quickly turned to ask another to serve as godmother for her child. The second baby to be baptized was Angeliki’s son, and she whispered the name she had chosen for him—Constantine—as the priest took him from her arms. One woman handed over her tiny daughter and announced that the child’s name was to be Laocratia, which means “the people’s rule.” The old priest frowned; the Greek church requires that every infant must bear the na
me of a recognized saint, but he said nothing and lifted the squalling, naked infant three times into the air, then submerged her in the font, chanting, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I baptize thee Laocratia.”

  When the archimandrite finished with the last of the babies, he called all the mothers together and admonished them sternly, “I charge all of you with the solemn responsibility to take care that none of these fifteen infants ever marry one another, because they have all been baptized in the same oil and they are now spiritual brothers and sisters. For any of them to be married would be incest.”

  The women were frightened by this unorthodox ceremony led by a prisoner priest, their babies in rags, with none of the usual joy and dancing, tossing of coins and Jordan almonds for luck. They nodded obediently as the priest spoke. Then the old man in his black gown and stovepipe hat was led back toward the prison by his captors. The next day he was executed.

  Katis was extremely disappointed with the mildewed linens and few cans of food that had been dug up in the Haidis garden. He had to prove that the Amerikana had hidden enough riches to provoke the envy and resentment of the villagers. After all, many of his informants reported that she had a considerable cache of gold sovereigns concealed somewhere. He ordered that she be put to the torture again.

  On the sixth day after Eleni had been sentenced to death, Angeliki Botsaris Daikos was feeding her newly baptized son when the assistant to the head of the security police, a man named Mihalis Hassiotis, appeared at her door. “What a fearsome man he was!” Angeliki says. “Whenever we saw him walk by we made our cross that he didn’t stop for us. But this day he came right to my door and said, They want to question you.’”