Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  In Leshinitsa, just over the Albanian border, Glykeria was still struggling under the weight of Stavroula Yakou’s possessions. When she pleaded exhaustion, Stavroula pointedly reminded her that she was in a Communist country now, and without a powerful friend to protect her, her chances of survival were small.

  The Greek exiles at Leshinitsa were divided into groups of ten and sent on foot to Delvino, fifteen miles away, where they were met by a lumbering convoy of battered army vehicles which stretched for miles into the distance, ferrying the refugees to Aghies Sarantes, twenty miles farther west on the coast. The port was choked with displaced families from all over northern Greece who were to be sent by ship to northern Albania, far from the reach of the Greek army. The Liotes waited for two days, sleeping in a mosque, until room was found for them on one of the flat-bottomed barges. It was in Aghies Sarantes that women from Lia happened on a group of children headed for Rumania with the pedomasoma. Among them were some of those who had been taken from Lia only days before.

  Dina Venetis began frantically searching for her son Vangeli. She found him in a large barnlike structure where Albanian women were stripping the children and boiling their clothes to kill the lice. Vangeli blushed at having his mother and other women see him naked. He hung his head and Dina saw that it, too, was covered with lice. She borrowed a pair of scissors from another woman and began to clip the boy’s hair down to the scalp, but she cropped only half of it before he was summoned by one of the guards and pulled out of her grasp to collect his wet clothing. She would not see Vangeli again for seven years.

  After two days the villagers were driven onto barges for the two-day trip up the Adriatic coast to the port of St. John (or “Shengjin” in Albanian) and then inland to Shkodra. They were crammed together, 250 to a boat, unable to move. For peasants who had never seen the sea, the journey seemed like the ride to Hades on Charon’s raft. The overladen barge yawed and rocked on the stony surface of the water as women and children screamed and became seasick. Soon the deck was awash with urine and vomit. Glykeria squawked in protest as one neighbor threw up right in her lap. Vangelina Gatzoyiannis recalls that an old woman urinated on a small sack of dry porridge that she had managed to carry with her. Later, when her children began to starve in Shkodra, Vangelina cooked it and fed it to them anyway.

  Athena Stratis, the third daughter of Alexo Gatzoyiannis, was sitting near Glykeria trying to hold on to her four small children. Certain that they would tumble over the low sides, she cried, “Help me, Glykeria! Take one of the children! They’re going to die!”

  “I’m dying myself!” Glykeria moaned, holding her stomach. But that night, when Alexo’s daughter Niki pushed her way to the side to vomit, the little girl fainted and nearly slipped into the black water. Glykeria reached out and caught her by the back of her dress, saving her life.

  When they disembarked at St. John, trucks took the refugees twenty miles north, to the city of Shkodra on the bank of Lake Skutari, which extends into Yugoslavia. The exhausted peasants were deposited before a two-story dilapidated barracks which had been used as stables. “This is where you’re going to live,” they were told by guerrillas. “You’d better start cleaning it out, because you’re sleeping here tonight.”

  Glykeria gagged as they began shoveling out the manure that had accumulated on the two floors of tiny cubicles around a large central hall. That night she slept in one of the stalls along with fifteen other people from her village, including her cousin Athena and Tassina Bartzokis and their six children. She had nothing to sleep on; Stavroula had disappeared with her blankets, but Tassina put the girl under a rug with her three babies.

  Glykeria lived in the barracks in Shkodra for six months. The daily ration of food was one scoop of beans and a piece of rock-hard bread for each person. The refugees spent the daylight hours searching the surrounding area for pieces of firewood and wild greens that they might eat, and washing their lice-infested clothing in the lake. Glykeria had never been so hungry in her life. There was an old woman named Nikolena Fanayea in the same cubicle who was dying of a cancer that blocked her throat. She couldn’t swallow the crusts of bread, only the center, so Glykeria would beg from her the soggy, chewed remnants, and if any of Tassina’s babies didn’t finish its bread, she would snatch the crust out of the child’s hand before its mother noticed.

  In March of 1949, as an icy wind whistled through the barracks, a rumor spread among the hundreds of refugees that all unmarried women were going to be sent back to Greece to the battlefields of Macedonia as andartinas. The frightened girls, including Glykeria, fled the barracks and hid in a deserted mosque, but Stavroula Yakou found them there and told Glykeria, “Don’t bother trying to hide, I’m making sure they send you.”

  Glykeria turned for help to an old woman who was the mother of her godfather, Nassios Economou, and therefore shared a responsibility for her welfare. Together they searched out the central office of the guerrillas and petitioned a bored official. “This girl doesn’t belong in the army; she’s only fifteen,” the old woman quavered. “I was at her baptism and can testify to her age.”

  The man searched through some files and slapped a folder on the desk with an air of finality. “Her name is written here by officials from her village. She has to go,” he announced.

  They returned to find the barracks in an uproar as screaming girls were being dragged into two army trucks parked outside the door. There was a guerrilla from Lia named Yianni Kepas identifying the ones to be taken; the same young man who had played the tragic heroine in the Skevis brothers’ skit, “Homes in Ruins.” He pointed to Glykeria, and two men came toward her while one of her girl friends clung to her and wept.

  As parents watched their daughters led away to fight for a doomed cause, knowing that they had little chance of survival, their voices rose in a great outpouring of grief. The sound was suddenly punctuated by hysterical screams, like the cries of a wounded animal, startling the crowd into silence.

  They looked around to see Stavroula Yakou being dragged toward the truck by guerrillas, kicking and scratching.

  “You’ve made a mistake! I’m a married woman! You need me here!” she was screeching as she writhed in their hands. Although Stavroula had won a position of influence with the guerrillas through her beauty and cleverness, she was terrified of gunfire and had never expected to be conscripted as an andartina. She fought with the strength of blind panic and managed to break free, but the guerrillas caught her by the back of her dress, ripping it open.

  As they carried Stavroula back toward the truck her dress was open to the waist, exposing her breasts as she struggled and bit her captors. The villagers watched slack-jawed with astonishment. In a society where even a woman’s hair must be hidden, Stavroula should have been shamed for life, but she seemed oblivious to her condition as she let loose a stream of curses. The guerrillas threw her into the truck while the other girls drew aside; the thud of her body was audible in the hush. Instantly Stavroula scrambled out, still screaming. As the guerrillas tossed her ignominiously back in, Yianni Kepas signaled for the driver to start and the truck roared away until Stavroula’s cries were lost in the distance. The Liotes took a grim satisfaction in seeing the despised collaborator humbled, but no one was as pleased as Glykeria, the only one who rode off toward the battlefields with a smile on her face.

  While Glykeria was headed for Macedonia, the other four Gatzoyiannis children, dressed in black mourning, waited in Igoumenitsa for the papers that would take them to America. They had been moved out of the relative luxury of the unfinished house into one of the corrugated-tin Quonset huts which the soldiers were building in the fields below to accommodate the flood of refugees. The eight members of their family lived in one room and did their cooking at outdoor fires, drew water from a nearby stream and used the fields for a toilet.

  Christos had written the children asking if they wanted to live with their grandparents in the village, make a home in Athens, or join him in Americ
a. Their grandfather, Kitso, tried to frighten them into staying in Greece. “You’ll never see the sky for all the smoke from the factories,” he predicted gloomily. “You’ll never eat olive oil, feta cheese or lamb again. It’s an evil country filled with foreigners. You girls will marry Italians or worse!”

  But the children were adamant in their determination to sail to America, as their mother had commanded. Kanta wrote a letter to her father saying, “We’re strong. We’ll work in the factories and keep house for you.” At the age of fifty-six, Christos realized that his days of married bachelorhood were over; he would finally have to face the responsibilities of raising four children, including the son he had never seen.

  Because their father had been a United States citizen since before 1920, their papers were cleared quickly despite Greece’s wartime status. Shortly after New Year’s Day, 1949, the children were notified by the American embassy in Athens that they had only to appear at the consulate to collect their passport.

  Olga announced to her grandfather that before she left Greece, she was determined to go back to the village and transfer her mother’s body from the unmarked ravine to a church. Reluctantly, Kitso agreed. The two of them set out for Lia along with the fourth daughter of Alexo, Stavroula Vrakas, who would join her father, Foto, to disinter her mother’s body at the same time. They found the village desolate, inhabited only by a half-dozen men living like squatters, waiting for their families to return.

  Olga and Kitso slept in the Haidis house that night, but in the morning the girl awoke to find her grandfather gone. After waiting several hours, she walked down to Foto Gatzoyiannis’ house, where she asked her cousin Stavroula, “Have you seen my papou? He’s been gone all morning.”

  “So has my father!” Stavroula exclaimed. “They must have sneaked off to dig up the bodies without us so we wouldn’t see them!”

  The girls hurried up toward the Chapel of St. Nicholas, but when they reached the spot, the two men had already finished depositing Eleni’s and Alexo’s remains together in a small box which Kitso had fashioned of rough wooden planks. It was about three feet long and lettered on the front in crude, angry splashes of white paint were the words: “Eleni C. Gatzoyiannis, 41, and Alexandra F. Gatzoyiannis, 56, murdered by Communist gangsters.” Olga ran to open the box, screaming, “I want to see my mother!” but her grandfather held her back.

  The two old men, followed by the two weeping girls, carried the box down toward the village. When they reached the Spring of Siouli they set it down to rest. Waiting until the men had turned their backs, Stavroula Vrakas darted up and opened the cover. Both girls peered inside to see only one skull, the head of Alexo, with bits of flesh and hair still clinging to it. Olga began to shriek: “There’s only one head in there! Where’s my mother?”

  Her uncle Foto glowered. “What do you want to see your mother’s head for?” he snapped. “It’s in there, but in pieces!”

  Kitso grasped Olga’s arm and spoke more kindly “Your mother’s hair is just the same, shining like silk, but her skull is broken—perhaps when they piled the boulders on the bodies …”

  Olga couldn’t stop the hysterical cries which poured out of her all the way down to the Church of St. Demetrios. As the box was deposited without ceremony in the church ossuary, she was seized with the idea that the Communists had killed Eleni by stoning her—a form of execution that was not unheard of in the villages. She wept for her mother all that night until she fell asleep exhausted. Then, she says, Eleni appeared to her in a dream, her face wet with tears, and said, “No, my child! They didn’t kill me with rocks. They shot me here,” indicating her heart.

  The dream startled Olga awake, and as she sat watching the sun come up over her familiar mountaintops, she was relieved to think that her mother had died swiftly. As they set out on foot back to Igoumenitsa, she felt a kind of peace. Her mother lay in the neighborhood Church of St. Demetrios beside the bones of her beloved mother-in-law, Fotini, and now Olga could turn with a clear conscience to the journey that lay ahead of the children, fulfilling the destiny that Eleni had wanted for them.

  The departure from Igoumenitsa was a tearful one, for when the four children sailed on the ferryboat that would take them to Corfu, to board a larger ship for the port of Athens, they left their grandmother and Nitsa and Andreas behind, perhaps forever. Their grandfather was escorting them to the capital to put them on the ocean liner that would take them to New York.

  Megali and Nitsa wailed that they would never see the children again while Andreas grimaced with the effort of hiding his emotion. But just as the warning whistle signaled that it was time to board, Fotini ran up to him with a parting gift, a coin she had been hoarding, worth less than a penny, and Andreas began to cry.

  Kitso Haidis set off on the journey in a foul humor, still trying to convince the girls not to leave Greece. They spent the night in Corfu in a hotel room on the harborside and the children gawked at the arcaded streets and the huge public squares. The next morning they boarded a ship headed for Athens’ port of Piraeus. Nikola watched the island slip behind the horizon without emotion. Since the night they left the village he had been careful not to let himself become attached to any one person or place. Only the farewell to his grandmother and his uncle Andreas hurt a little, but he frowned and scuffed the toes of his new oxfords and managed to look unconcerned.

  Yianni Gatzoyiannis, the handsome twenty-nine-year-old son of Alexo and Foto, was on hand to meet them in Piraeus and take them by bus into the city of Athens, which was beyond anything the children had imagined, even though it still bore the marks of war and the collapsing Greek economy. Yianni worked as a waiter in an Athens restaurant and the children couldn’t get over his fine clothes and city manners. He led them to the Hotel Cyprus, where they gaped at the high ceilings and huge doors. They were all put in one room and their grandfather showed them the greatest wonder of all: a toilet in a cubicle down the hall, where he demonstrated how to pull the chain so that it flushed. Fotini and Nikola were fascinated by the exciting sound of running water. As soon as they could evade their grandfather’s eyes, they scurried down the hall to pull the chain and watch the waterfall over and over again.

  They were invited to Yianni’s small house in Kolonaki for dinner, where the children shot sidelong glances at his beautiful nineteen-year-old wife Katie, with her short curly hair, blue polka-dot dress and lipstick. They all whispered that she must be an immoral woman to be painted that way.

  On February 19, 1949, shortly after their arrival, Kitso herded the family to the American embassy, where they were given a passport in the name of Olga, who had just passed her twenty-first birthday. On the way out they rushed up to examine the American guard standing outside a sentry box, the first black man they had ever seen. They stared and poked at the discomfited Marine until their grandfather dragged them away muttering, “It’s a human being, idiots! What do you think it is?”

  There were many mysteries to ponder during the two weeks in Athens. Olga grappled with the intricacies of a telephone, holding the receiver at arm’s length. Her grandfather took her to see one of the great department stores, Diamantopoulos, where she walked straight into a mirrored wall, then became insulted when she addressed the smartly dressed mannequins with a polite “Good day” as her mother had taught her and did not receive an answer. “They’re statues!” sputtered her exasperated grandfather. “Do you want the whole world to know you’re an ignorant peasant?”

  On the last day of February, Kitso led the children back to the port of Piraeus, trying all the way to talk them out of leaving, but when the launch came to take them out to the converted troop carrier, the Marine Carp, Kitso’s lower lip began to tremble beneath his white mustache. “Take a good look at that sky; you’ll never see it again!” he growled, wiping a sleeve across his eyes. Nikola watched his grandfather impassively. He felt nothing at leaving Greece, only trepidation over what lay ahead. He followed his sisters into the launch; when they reached the shi
p they climbed the shaky ladder up to the deck, crowded with passengers in strange, foreign-looking clothes. As the ship began to pull out, he looked back and saw the shrunken figure of his grandfather frantically waving the walking stick he had carved from the branch of a cornel tree, polished to a dark sheen by the touch of his hands over the years.

  The journey of the Marine Carp took twenty-one days. The ship first went east to Haifa, Israel, and then turned back, stopping at Palermo, Sicily, before heading west toward New York. When it pulled into the Italian port, Nikola watched a flock of ragged beggar children no older than himself who crowded the dock begging the passengers to throw them food and cigarettes, which they puffed with practiced aplomb. He realized that if it weren’t for a parent in America, he would be a beggar too. Because Olga and Kanta were confined to their hammocks with seasickness in the crowded dormitory, he was left to his own devices. He spent the journey trying to teach himself the English alphabet and numbers in order to impress the father who would be waiting in New York.

  On the morning of March 21, 1949, the Marine Carp steamed into New York harbor. Most of the immigrants rushed to marvel at the Statue of Liberty, the “Saint Freedom” Christos had written about, but Nikola looked with dismay at the land, where dingy gray snow lay in the hollows. He realized that he had left a country where oranges and lemons were now ripening under a brilliant blue sky for this dismal, unwelcoming place.

  A muscular seventeen-year-old boy from the village of Babouri, Prokopi Koulisis, stood near him at the rail. As the ship pulled closer to the dock, Nikola noticed the swarm of automobiles filling the streets. “Is America at war?” he asked the older boy in alarm. “Why are there so many vehicles rushing around?”

  “In America, ordinary people have cars just like diplomats and ministers in Greece,” Prokopi explained. Nikola silently digested this fact. He had never known anyone who owned an automobile.