Angeliki picked up the baby, hoping that the guerrillas would be more gentle with a mother holding an infant in her arms, and Hassiotis led her up the path toward the Gatzoyiannis house. On the way, Angeliki saw the head of intelligence, Sotiris Drapetis, leading Ourania Haidis in the same direction. Ourania was married to a cousin of Eleni’s who had made a comfortable fortune in the black market during and after the occupation. Angeliki and Ourania exchanged frightened glances. They had both been hidden witnesses to Eleni’s ordeal a few days before when she was forced to show where her daughter’s dowry was hidden.
The two women were led into the security police station. Ourania Haidis was put in the small dirt-floored pantry behind the kitchen where the window had been securely repaired since Marianthe Ziaras’ escape. Angeliki and her baby were led directly into the good chamber—the office—where she came face to face with Katis.
The balding judge with the doomsday voice began by asking Angeliki her parents’ names, her husband’s family’s names, and then he said, “Are you related to the Amerikana?”
“No, just fellow villagers,” Angeliki replied.
“Then why did she and her family visit your house so often?”
Angeliki felt her throat closing. “It’s the custom here, whether related or not,” she quavered. “We were neighbors.”
Katis leaned forward, fixing her with the eyes of a predator.
“Now I’m going to ask you some questions and I want precise answers,” he snapped. “What day, what hour, did the Amerikana give you three gold sovereigns and what did you do with them? Who did you give them to?”
Angeliki looked stunned. She didn’t know what was happening or what she should answer. “Comrade Katis!” she pleaded. “I never got three sovereigns from the Amerikana!”
“If you lie,” replied Katis, “you will receive the same fate she does.”
Angeliki told him that she did in fact have six sovereigns, which she wore constantly in a leather pouch tied around her neck under her clothing, and that she had six more sovereigns which she had given to her mother to wear in a similar pouch in case one of them was killed. But, she insisted, they had been given to her by her husband, not the Amerikana.
Katis pressed his lips into a thin line which had the hint of a smile. He called in Hassiotis and ordered him to take Angeliki down to the cellar prison, where she could speak directly to the Amerikana.
Angeliki found Eleni sitting on the threshold of the door that led to the cellar. Her legs, black and swollen, were stretched out in front of her, and her blue dress with the three black stripes was open at the throat and filthy. Eleni was blinking in the sunlight and seemed at first not to recognize Angeliki. Hassiotis prompted the prisoner like a director. “Tell us again, Comrade Eleni, how you gave three sovereigns to this woman.”
Eleni’s eyes focused on Angeliki and she made a gesture of recognition. “Yes, that’s right, child. Give the man three sovereigns.”
Panic washed over Angeliki and she began to tremble with anger. She put the baby on the ground and, leaning forward, seized Eleni by the shoulders, and shook her fiercely. “You never gave me any sovereigns, Eleni!” she shouted into her friend’s face. “What do you want to do, take me to the grave with you?”
Eleni made no more response than a rag doll. When Angeliki released her she sat there, her swollen legs extended before her, and her vacant gaze fell on the swaddled baby lying on the ground, reaching with his plump hands for a mote of dust floating in the sunlight. “Oh, if I could only touch them one more time!” Eleni said, as if to herself.
Angeliki was startled. “What did you say?”
“If only I could feel my arms around them one more time before I die!” Tears were spilling silently down Eleni’s cheeks.
Angeliki looked at the wreckage of her friend and fear for her own safety gave way to compassion. She reached out and touched Eleni’s hand. “All right, Aunt,” she said. “I’ll give them the sovereigns they want.”
Eleni did not reply. She just nodded vaguely in Angeliki’s direction.
Hassiotis and the other guerrillas led Angeliki back to the presence of Katis. Still carrying the baby, she took off the pouch of sovereigns from around her neck and dropped it on the desk in front of him. “Take them!” she said.
Katis seized the pouch and threw it across the room at her. “These are not the Amerikana’s sovereigns; these are yours and we know how you got them!” he said, in a tone implying that Angeliki had been rewarded with gold for her services to the British. “A million such sovereigns couldn’t buy the Amerikana’s life,” Katis shouted. “Traitors must be executed! Now tell us what you know of the Amerikana’s sovereigns.”
Katis got up from his chair and walked around the desk to where Angeliki was standing, the baby in her arms. He drew back his hand and slapped her hard across the face. “I must have lost my senses when he did that,” Angeliki says, “because when I opened my eyes, the baby was not in my arms but was being held by a guerrilla. He never stopped crying.”
Katis continued to grill her. “Who did you give the Amerikana’s sovereigns to? What was she paying them for?” But Angeliki kept insisting that she had no sovereigns but her own. Finally they handed the baby back to her and told her to go. Shakily she walked out the door. When she neared the gate, she turned around to see Eleni still sitting in the same spot on the threshold of the cellar.
Angeliki started toward her to explain what had happened upstairs: she had tried to give up her own sovereigns to save Eleni’s life but the guerrillas realized that whatever Eleni had told them about handing over sovereigns of her own—words wrung out of her by torture—was not true. The two guerrilla guards outside the cellar door stepped forward, barring her way, and motioned for her to leave. As Angeliki paused, Eleni raised a hand in farewell and spoke, the clearest words Angeliki had heard from her that afternoon.
“Don’t forget me!” Eleni called after her.
Angeliki raised her hand in response, and stood a moment trying to think of something to say, then she turned silently and went out the gate.
While Angeliki was being questioned, Ourania Haidis, a stocky, high-strung young woman, was kept waiting in the small pantry, surrounded by piles of shoes taken from prisoners who had been subjected to falanga and then killed. When Angeliki had gone, Katis ordered Ourania brought in and asked her the same questions: Where were the three sovereigns the Amerikana had given her? She made the same response—the only sovereigns she had were those her husband had left her.
Ourania and Angeliki were the only women in the village who had gold sovereigns. Eleni must have known it and under the insistence of her torturers, given their names in hope they would come to her aid. But Ourania, like Angeliki, protested that the Amerikana had given her no sovereigns. When Katis slapped her, she became hysterical. They told her they were taking her down to face Eleni. Ourania claims that she and her cousin never exchanged a word. “She seemed to be in a daze and didn’t look at me,” Ourania says, beginning to stammer at the memory and avoiding the eyes of her questioner. “When I saw her like that, I fainted, and when I came to, they sent me home. We never spoke to each other.”
During the final week of Eleni’s life, Glykeria still worked the fields of Macrohori and Vatsounia. She sweltered in the same red wool dress she had worn for nearly three months; her fourteen-year-old body could not keep up with the demands of cutting wheat from dawn to dusk and carrying large stones to build pillboxes for the andartes. Because the women from Lia picked on her, hitting her and complaining of her laziness, Glykeria had begun working with the more sympathetic group from Babouri.
Early on the morning of August 28 the women from Babouri, working near the village of Macrohori, had just started the day’s threshing when they were visited by an imposing figure, Lieutenant Alekos, who had been one of the instructors of the andartinas taken from Lia. He arrived on a fine white horse and informed the threshers, “You young girls, all those who are unmar
ried, get ready to leave! You’re finished with the harvest, you’re all being inducted into the Democratic Army today.”
The girls from Babouri began screaming and crying while the nearby group from Lia, working on an adjacent hillside, jeered. There was such a rivalry between the two neighboring villages that the Babouriote women had always bragged they were spared from being guerrillas because they could cook, clean and care for the troops so much better than the useless Liote women, who were good for nothing but cannon fodder. Now as the women of Babouri wept, Glykeria sat in silent bewilderment. She didn’t know if she was to be inducted with them or not. She stood up and asked the lieutenant and he looked at her strangely. “No, you’re not to go with them,” he said. “You’re going back to your village along with the unmarried girls of Lia.”
Glykeria knew she should have felt relieved—her summer-long ordeal was over—but she was filled with a vague anxiety. There were tears in her eyes as she kissed her friends among the Barbouriotes goodbye. She would never see most of them again. The young girls were so inadequately trained before they were thrown into the last doomed battles of the war that many died quickly.
The journey back to Lia took over two hours, and Glykeria walked under the scorching sun with some of the other unmarried girls from her village, including Xanthi Nikou, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the condemned Vasili Nikou. Their route led over the mountain peaks, southwest toward Lia, past the hills of Tserovetsi and Skitari. The girls passed the Chapel of St. Nicholas, tucked in the hidden green valley amid prehistoric grave tumuli. Glykeria made her cross and said a silent prayer as they moved on. Just beyond the chapel they came upon a group of guerrillas, some of the dozens who were camped on the peak of the Prophet Elias just above their heads on the strategic height which overlooked the country for miles. They were hard at work digging a large square hole at the lowest point in a field that belonged to Tassi Mitros, just above a small brook. The girls hurried on past them, not stopping to speak to the guerrillas or to wonder what the ditch was intended for.
They quickened their pace as they passed over the flat, verdant nose of the triangle, the Agora, and then stood looking down on their village from the top of the man-made series of terraced stone steps which the villagers called Laspoura, meaning “muddy.” From that point Glykeria could make out her own house in the Perivoli, and the sight of it filled her with an inexplicable fear. She could see half a dozen guerrillas outside the gate.
Glykeria and the rest nearly ran down the path toward the Perivoli. Just above the spring, by the mill of Tassi Mitros, they encountered Tassina Bartzokis. At the sight of the bedraggled girls, Tassina began to cry and threw her arms around Glykeria. It was from Tassina that Glykeria and Xanthi learned their mother and father had been condemned to death and were being held prisoner in the Gatzoyiannis house, pending their execution.
The two girls, fourteen and sixteen years old, ran to the gate of the security police station and learned from the two guards stationed outside that it was true. They began to cry at the top of their voices. “Shush, quiet!” the nervous guards told them. “We’re not going to kill them! They’ll probably get a reprieve from Markos any day now.”
Still weeping, Glykeria and Xanthi sat down in the dust outside the gate and refused to move until they were allowed to see their parents. Soon they were joined by the two elder Nikou girls, Chrysoula and Olga, who had heard the commotion and learned that their sister and Glykeria had come back from the harvesting. They added their pleas to those of the two teen-agers: “We won’t go home until we see them! You have to let us in!”
It was about eleven o’clock and the uproar caused by the four girls drew nearly everyone in the Perivoli to their windows. Inside the police station’s office Katis heard the shouts and cries. He thought in disgust what kind of impression the commotion must be making on the neighborhood. Finally he sent word out to the guards at the gate: Bring in the women; they would be allowed to see the two prisoners. Anything to shut up their caterwauling!
The four frightened girls were led into the good chamber, where Katis stood, his face like a thundercloud. He made a signal to the guards, and soon Eleni and Vasili Nikou were led into the room, both supported by a guerrilla on each side. The two prisoners were dazed and frightened, nearly unconscious of their surroundings. All they knew was that they had been led out of the cellar and they were certain the time for their execution had come. Even when their daughters began to scream at the sight of them, they didn’t recognize the children. Both prisoners slumped down on the floor, leaning against a wall. Eleni, catching sight of the familiar iconostasis in the corner, murmured, “My poor house! What have you come to?”
Both Vasili Nikou and Eleni were bruised about the face, their lips swollen, their eyes livid from blows. They were infested with lice, and Eleni, in far worse condition than the man, sat with her grotesquely swollen legs in front of her. Wailing, the girls threw themselves on their parents and the commotion in the police station became even worse than before. Katis angrily ordered one of the guerrillas to crank up the gramophone and put on a record full blast to drown out the sounds of their laments. The incongruous melody, a raucous rebetiko from the sailors’ bars in Piraeus, blared out in the breathless noonday hush while the guerrillas and Katis moved closer to hear what the prisoners and their daughters were saying to one another.
Glykeria knelt on the floor in front of Eleni and reached for her. “Mana, what have they done to you?” she cried. There was no answer and the girl stared in growing horror at her mother’s unkempt hair, unbuttoned dress and ghastly, misshapen legs and feet.
The touch of Glykeria’s hand and the sound of her voice brought Eleni out of her daze and she recognized the daughter she had been praying for every day. “My child!” she said, repeating it several times. Then, speaking slowly to make herself understood, she said, “Don’t worry about me, my soul. Look at you! You’re worn to a husk!”
Glykeria pressed her face against her mother’s breast and cried, “I missed you so! What have they done with the others?”
“The children left,” Eleni replied, stroking her hair. “They’re safe and I don’t care what happens to me now. You mustn’t cry. I just want you to be well. I don’t want to think of you crying like this.”
While Glykeria and Eleni whispered together, the guards taunted Vasili Nikou, who had also recognized and embraced his daughters. He was embarrassed at their tears and at being seen in his wretched condition. “Go home now, girls,” he said quietly. “For God’s sake, go home!”
“Don’t despair, Uncle Vasili,” said one of the guards with a smile. “Now is the moment to tell your daughters anything you have to say to them. If you have any sovereigns hidden somewhere, tell them now.”
The leathery old cooper turned a look on the man which cowed him into silence, despite the prisoner’s black and distorted face.
“Everything I have, my children have,” Nikou said. “If you’ve carried the gun for two years, I carried it for nine. I know about war and I know what you’re going to do to me. I know it all.” Then he turned back to his daughters and said sternly, “Leave now. Go back to your mother.” They did as they were told, but on the threshold Chrysoula turned to Katis and spoke one word: “Vulture!”
“Hold your tongue, Comrade,” said the judge, flushing, “or you won’t leave here.”
Eleni and Glykeria were sitting together holding hands, each trying to stay calm so as not to frighten the other. Eleni told Glykeria she should go home and rest; she looked sick and exhausted. The girl kept asking her mother what she could do for her.
“Rest first,” Eleni told her, “then look to see if there are any tomatoes in the field and bring me one. Go to Eugenia Petsis—she has our animals—and see if she can send me any milk or shilira with you.” She touched the girls’ cheek and added, “If anything happens, I’ve left several okas of corn and wheat in the house for you, and there’s the fields and the animals.”
G
lykeria started to protest, but Eleni silenced her. “You must save yourself,” she insisted, then she sighed. “Lucky Constantina Drouboyiannis,” she added.
“What do you mean, Mother?” Glykeria asked, bewildered.
“She’s a lucky woman. She saved her daughters and she saved herself.”
Eleni paused and looked at the girl as if struck by an idea. Then she motioned to Katis, who was standing nearby. He came closer in order to hear what she was saying over the blare of the gramophone.
“Comrade Katis,” Eleni said politely, as if speaking to a social acquaintance. “Could I have a word with you in private?”
“Of course,” he said amiably.
Bracing herself on her daughter’s shoulder, Eleni struggled to her feet. She walked with Katis the few steps to the hall that divided the good chamber from the pantry. Glykeria stared after them, but she could hear nothing that Eleni was saying. She saw her whisper to Katis and make a gesture in her direction. Glykeria got the impression that Eleni was begging or bargaining with Katis to spare her daughter from torture or death. The magistrate listened and nodded, then the pair returned to the good chamber.
“Go now, child,” Eleni said unsteadily. “Go and rest and then come back. I want to see you again.” She stood there, looking at Glykeria. Then she touched her cheek again. “My daughter, may you live for me as long as the mountains.”
Glykeria gazed at her mother’s thin face, sorrowful as that of the Madonna on the family’s icon, her eyes filled with hard light, the fine skin of her forehead etched with tiny wrinkles like silk cloth. The dark circles around her eyes made them seem unnaturally large and luminous. She seized Eleni’s hand and pressed it to her cheek, feeling the rough fingers against her flesh, wet with her tears. They kissed, and then Glykeria turned and went out the door. When she turned around, she saw her mother standing, framed by the front door of her house, staring after the girl as if to fix her image in her mind, holding tight to the doorjamb for support. Eleni raised her hand in farewell. Glykeria shouted, “Don’t worry! I’ll be back!” and then she walked toward the gate. Before it closed behind her, she turned again and saw the face of her aunt peering from the cellar window, her hands clutching the bars. The girl made a sign to her but Alexo seemed not to know her. She was silently shaking her head from side to side.
Eleni Page 58
