Eleni
Page 68
There was no doubt in my mind that Katis deserved to die. I was convinced he hadn’t changed in the years since he sent my mother to her death. I had seen the arrogance and the killer’s cold indifference in his eyes when he came toward me.
I vowed that I would confront him again, when I could act without emotion and without fear of interference from his family, and I did.
It was four months later, in the port of Igoumenitsa on the Ionian Sea, where I learned Katis and his family had taken an apartment for the summer. I waited outside the building until I saw his wife, daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons leave the apartment and head toward the beach for a swim. I had shaved off my beard, and his wife walked by me without recognition.
Knowing that Katis was alone, I let myself into his apartment by forcing the lock with a plastic card. I opened the door slowly and saw him in front of me, asleep in a chair pulled up to the picture window of the living room. In the merciless sunlight, his gap-toothed mouth hung open, his head resting on one shoulder. The pajama top he was wearing over his trousers was open to reveal the caved-in chest and wrinkled potbelly. His flesh was gray.
He didn’t stir as I examined him from a few yards away. I felt no pity for him, his age and his helplessness, only hatred and revulsion. He looked like a cadaver. I had the gun in the small of my back but I realized I could simply smother him with a pillow and leave. His family would return to discover that Katis had died in his sleep. No one would suspect I had ever been there.
I stood staring at the man who had killed my mother for a few minutes, perhaps more. Then I turned around and walked out, closing the door softly behind me. This time I knew it was truly finished. I had found the perfect opportunity for killing him and I couldn’t do it. At the end of my long journey I learned that I didn’t have the will.
This ending is not the one I had expected when I began to write. There is no satisfaction in it. The pain of my mother’s murder is still as sharp, and the anger that her killer lives increases every day.
I have done nothing since leaving Igoumenitsa but ask myself why I didn’t kill him. I know it was fear that stopped me: partly the fear of being separated from my children and of setting in motion events that would continue the killing and the suffering into future generations. It was also something else: the understanding of my mother that I had gained in my examination of her life.
During my search I had learned some of her last words, clues to her thoughts as she prepared to die. To Glykeria, our mother remarked on the good fortune of Constantina Drouboyiannis in saving both her daughters and her own life, but she said nothing of hatred or revenge. When Angeliki Botsaris was brought to face her on the day before the execution, my mother did not speak of the pain of her torture, but only of her longing to embrace her children one last time. And her final cry, before the bullets of the firing squad tore into her, was not a curse on her killers but an invocation of what she died for, a declaration of love: “My children!”
Unlike Hecuba, my mother did not spend the last of her strength cursing her tormentors, but, like Antigone, she found the courage to face death because she had done her duty to those she loved. Sophocles’ Antigone tells the man who has condemned her to death, her uncle and king, “It’s not my nature to join in hating, but in loving.”
That was Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ nature as well, and Katis had not been able to destroy it by killing her. Like the mulberry tree in our yard, which still stands after the house has fallen into ruins, that love has taken root in us, her children, and spread to her grandchildren as well.
If I killed Katis, I would have to uproot that love in myself and become like him, purging myself as he did of all humanity or compassion. Just as he had abandoned his baby daughter and wife to become a killer for the guerrillas, I would have to put aside thoughts of what I was doing to my children’s lives. My mother had done everything out of love for her own children.
Killing Katis would give me relief from the pain that had filled me for so many years. But as much as I want that satisfaction, I’ve learned that I can’t do it. My mother’s love, the primary impulse of her life, still binds us together, often surrounding me like a tangible presence. Summoning the hate necessary to kill Katis would sever that bridge connecting us and destroy the part of me that is most like Eleni.
A Note from the Author
The world in which Eleni lived and died has been reconstructed in this book not only from the memories of myself and my sisters but also from the recollections of scores of people who are now scattered in more than a dozen countries. All the names, places and dates are real. Every incident described in the book that I did not witness personally was described to me by at least two people who were interviewed independently of each other. All the interviews were recorded—secretly in the case of uncooperative witnesses—and translated into English by me. The transcribed interviews and the documents I collected—journals, letters, military reports, photographs, battle maps—fill a wall of files in my home.
Some of those interviewed possess a remarkable memory and were able to describe not only incidents but also how the people involved dressed, moved and spoke in precise detail. In other instances, however, I was given only the rudiments of a conversation, and following the example of Thucydides, “I put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them.”
To bring characters in the book to life, I have sometimes described their thoughts and feelings as well as their actions. Most of the thoughts of Eleni and others who are dead were deduced from things they said to surviving relatives and friends, who passed them on to me. In a very few instances when no information was available—such as the last images Eleni saw before being executed—I went to the actual sites and tried to imagine myself in her place.
All the skills learned and sharpened during my two decades as an investigative reporter were put to use in this most difficult and important investigation of my life; the reason I became a journalist in the first place. From the testimony of aging peasant men and women; former Communist, nationalist and British army officers; relatives, friends and enemies—from the endless single-spaced transcripts of interviews and the yellowing documents stored in my files—I have gained to my own satisfaction, a true vision of the person who was Eleni Gatzoyiannis and of the world that created her life and death.
About the Author
NICHOLAS GAGE is a former investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. His articles won numerous journalistic awards. In 1980 he left the Times to devote himself fully to exploring the turbulent world of his childhood and to recreate it in Eleni.
A Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1983 by Nicolas Gage
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96644
eISBN: 978-0-307-76064-7
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
v3.0