Flags and banners fluttered above the heads of the crowd. The dampness of the air had made them heavy but they still furled and unfurled in the wind. Many of them were stained with red: the blood of the previous day’s victims.
‘There are so many women here,’ Themis commented to her brother.
They watched as a small group of women screamed in the face of a policeman who stood impassively on a street corner. He would not retaliate today. There was an atmosphere of hysteria as widows drunk on grief screamed and wailed.
The biggest banner of all read:
When the people are threatened with tyranny, they must choose either chains or guns.
Guns were standard issue for both police and gendarmes who were keeping an eye on the situation, but they were also in the hands of government troops who were now positioning themselves for a struggle. Even after the demonstration ended, the city remained on edge.
Themis and Panos walked slowly home, fearful of what might come next.
‘Something will happen,’ said Panos. ‘I am sure of it. That procession won’t be the end of it.’
Kyría Koralis was fretting.
‘When do you think Thanasis will be back?’ she asked. ‘He’ll tell us what’s happening, won’t he?’
Thanasis did not return at the usual time, but they got some news from the radio. ELAS troops had moved into the capital and begun attacking police stations and government buildings.
Clashes swiftly intensified and thousands of British troops joined with the government army to fight the communists.
‘You see,’ said Panos to Themis. ‘This is what they were waiting for. The chance to wipe us out. Fucking British!’
Kyría Koralis darted a disapproving look at her grandson.
‘Please, agápi mou . . .’
‘Shh, Panos. We’re trying to listen,’ said Margarita.
Themis followed Panos out on to the balcony. He was standing there with a look of fury on his face, one hand gripping the balcony rail so hard that the whites of his knuckles showed, the other holding a cigarette. His frustration at not being out there taking part in the action was palpable.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she comforted him.
‘We’ve swapped one set of foreigners on our soil for another,’ he said. ‘Instead of a German general attacking us, there’s a British one. I told you, Themis, that man Churchill only cares about one thing.’
Themis nodded. The British Prime Minister’s views on the communists were well known.
Street fighting was fierce and this time, no one had blank ammunition.
As the battles raged, the radio reports said, British soldiers used tanks to fire on ELAS, who had seized many police stations in the city and appeared to have the upper hand. Violence intensified with men, women and children all dying in crossfire between the various factions. Even during the occupation there had been no such bloodshed in the streets. Normal life in the city now ceased completely. Stores, restaurants and hotels were all closed and supplies of electricity and water cut. Bursts of sniper fire deterred anyone from going outside.
After three days, Kyría Koralis was beside herself with anxiety. Thanasis had not returned to Patissia since the fighting began.
‘My precious boy,’ she muttered, weeping over a photograph of her favourite grandson. It showed him graduating at the police academy. ‘My darling boy.’
Estimates for the number of those already killed in the fighting varied, but the number of dead police was known to be more than five hundred.
‘I’ll go to the hospital nearest his station, Yiayiá,’ said Margarita comfortingly on the fourth morning. ‘Maybe he’s there. We’ll find him. Don’t you worry.’
‘It’s so dangerous, agápi mou.’
‘Themis will come with me, won’t you, Themis?’
Themis thought it was madness to walk through the streets and the only word she could hear inside her head was ‘no’. But she did not say it. Thanasis was a member of the hated police force but he was still her brother.
The two of them made for the Evangelismos Hospital, zigzagging through the backstreets. Without a word, they surveyed the wreckage as they got closer to the centre. It was shocking to see the glass of shop fronts and cafés shattered, façades destroyed by shells, walls spattered with the spray of bullets.
Margarita wanted to blame ELAS, whilst Themis was certain that government forces and the British had been responsible. A hostile silence lay between them.
Halfway to their destination, they passed Themis’ pharmacy. All shops had been closed since the fighting had begun but now that they came within a hundred metres she realised it would not reopen for a very long time. The only reason she knew it was the Dimitriadis’ shop was that a section of porcelain jar had rolled out into the gutter. Next to it was a label with the familiar name, one that she had been so proud to work for.
Themis stepped on to the threshold, the shards of glass crunching beneath her thin soles. The black-and-white tessellated floor had survived but every glass phial on every shelf had been destroyed, as if used by a sniper for target practice.
‘Panagiá mou . . .!’ she gasped. ‘My beautiful shop.’
‘It’s not yours, Themis. It never was.’
Margarita was standing on the pavement. She was not interested in the damage.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You can’t just stand there crying.’
Themis did not move.
‘We need to get a move on,’ Margarita nagged.
At that moment the crack of gunfire made them both leap with fear.
Themis pulled her sister into the shop doorway.
‘Get down,’ she ordered her.
For once, Margarita did what her sister asked her. They both crouched in the shadows on the carpet of glass. For a while they held on to each other, brought close by fear.
The sporadic sound of gunfire continued in the street for a long while and at one point they heard voices directly outside.
‘That was English they were talking,’ said Themis, when the men had walked on. ‘British troops.’
From time to time, the gunfire intensified again and they cowered even lower, holding their hands over their ears. At last, night began to fall and it became too dark for a gun to be aimed with accuracy. Only then was there silence.
Margarita peered at her watch. She had told Themis that it was a gift from a loyal customer at the shop but her sister suspected that it was from her German lover.
‘It’s nine,’ she whispered. ‘We have to get home. It’s too late to go to the hospital.’
Themis nodded. All she wanted was to be in the safety of their apartment. The sisters held hands and, with their heads down, ran the entire length of Patission Avenue until the familiar turning to their square.
‘We couldn’t get there,’ said Margarita breathlessly to their grandmother, who was standing waiting expectantly for news. ‘It was too dangerous.’
Both were exhausted but their sleep was regularly broken by bad dreams that night.
The following morning, a colleague and school friend of Thanasis came round to see them. Giannis looked apprehensive when he appeared at the door. He clearly had something to tell them.
‘I don’t know exactly what happened,’ he said nervously, ‘but we were on duty yesterday and we came under fire.’
‘Theé mou, theé mou,’ Kyría Koralis kept on repeating, crossing herself over and over again.
‘We had to take cover in a nearby building – and it was shelled. It caught fire and we got trapped. I managed to get out but . . .’
‘What?’ urged Margarita.
‘. . . Thanasis wasn’t behind me. He didn’t come out . . .’
Giannis’ voice tailed off.
Kyría Koralis sank into a chair. Themis and Margarita grasped each other.
‘But it’s all right. I’ve found out that he’s in the Grande Bretagne. They’re using it as a hospital.’
Kyría Koralis beg
an to cry.
‘How badly wounded is he? Can’t we bring him home?’ asked Margarita.
Giannis hesitated for a moment. ‘I think he is safer where he is,’ he said. ‘And the military doctors are the best. I’ll bring you news when I get it.’
Themis wondered if he was telling them everything he knew, and her suspicion grew when he seemed to change the subject. He told them that ELAS were arresting people they suspected of collaboration and taking them to interrogation places. It could happen to anyone if there was the slightest suspicion.
‘You’ve just got to say the slightest thing against them,’ he said, ‘and you’re done for.’ He mimed having a gun at his head.
Then Giannis said he must leave. He was on duty again but promised to return if he found out any more.
The family was left in a state of relief and fear. At least they knew Thanasis was alive.
During the following days, the news in general continued to be disturbing as fighting continued. They were all aghast when a mass grave was found in one of the suburbs and it proved to most that ELAS was terrorising the city. Panos said little. He was suddenly ashamed of what his comrades were doing.
People seemed to be losing their humanity. The schism that existed between left and right had been allowed to widen, the polarisation to deepen, and now the city was paying the consequences.
Day after day, there were new and shocking reports of brutality and execution.
Survival became the central preoccupation of day-to-day life. The water supply was often cut off and bread was once again hard to come by.
‘It was better when the Germans were here,’ moaned Margarita. ‘Now we can’t even go out into the street.’
Themis could not contradict her. It had always been relatively safe to go outside before, but now it was foolhardy.
They gradually learnt to negotiate the dangers of the street, but what they had never imagined was that terror would come inside the home itself.
Kyría Koralis was dozing one afternoon, trying to put her worries about Thanasis to the back of her mind. Panos and Themis were sitting with their ears close to the radio trying to hear a news broadcast. Margarita was flicking through a well-thumbed German magazine. Suddenly the main door flew open; a single kick from a boot had been enough.
The entry of four British soldiers was so unexpected that they all froze where they were sitting. None of them really understood what was being shouted at them but instinctively put their hands in the air, even the old lady. They were waved into the corner of the room. All they knew was that they should get down and away from the windows.
Before the Koralis family could really take in what was happening, two of the soldiers had swept the cloth off the mahogany table, dragged the heavy piece of furniture across the room to the balcony doors and pushed it on to its side. Now, crouched behind it, they took turns to lean round the side to take aim. The glass from the doors was shattered into a thousand pieces and shards were scattered across the floor. One of the soldiers crawled on all fours to the balcony itself and began to fire.
Kyría Koralis, Margarita and Panos had been cowering behind two armchairs but now managed to make their way unscathed into one of the bedrooms. Themis stayed where she was.
In answer to the British shots came a volley of machine-gun fire, and the battle between the soldiers and whoever was down in the square continued for more than half an hour without a moment’s pause. Themis could see dozens of spent bullets lying on the rug and wondered what would happen when the ammunition ran out. The notion that the assailants in the square might come up to their apartment to hunt down British soldiers made her feel sick to the point of nausea. They had no escape route.
Suddenly, one of the soldiers took a direct hit in the head. Themis almost vomited as she saw the man’s brains spill out on to the floor. His death must have been almost instant. It was shocking to see a stranger’s corpse in their living room and she had to look away.
After some time, everything went silent. The soldier who had been on the balcony crawled back into the room and sheltered behind the table, even though several bullets had penetrated it. The atmosphere was tense. For some time, the soldiers sat whispering to one another. Two of them shared a cigarette. It was obvious that their comrade was dead so there was no sense of urgency about leaving and, eventually, when they were confident enough that the coast was clear they left, dragging the body with them. Themis felt herself almost stop breathing as they passed her hiding place. For the second time, she wanted to retch. The smell of their sweat and the dead man’s blood nauseated her.
Once the Koralis family had recovered a little from the shock, they spent the evening sweeping up the glass and picking tiny splinters out of the furniture, scrubbing stains from the rug and collecting spent cartridges. The table was put back in position, and Kyría Koralis spent hours polishing it, trying to remove the shrapnel marks. Tomorrow they would get the glass doors boarded up.
The following day, they heard a loud explosion. They all rushed to the balcony and looked out across the square. Flames were licking out of an apartment.
It had been blown up.
‘Perhaps the communists mistook it for our place,’ said Margarita. ‘They say that they attack anywhere that might have given shelter to their enemies. And we had British soldiers here.’
‘I never imagined we would be on the front line,’ said Kyría Koralis tearfully. ‘I hope dear Thanasis is safe.’
For the next seventy-two hours, Athens continued to be a battlefield. Sudden bursts of gunfire and the regular thud of shells put their nerves on edge and, with stories that some of the streets had been mined, going out to find food was more perilous than ever. Panos could not move fast enough, so the girls both went.
‘At least something has brought them together,’ commented Kyría Koralis, trying to find something positive to say to Panos. ‘It’s nice to see them talking, not just bickering.’
Her grandson did not answer.
‘Do you think they will be allowed to go and fetch Thanasis?’ she said brightly.
They still had no real idea of the nature of his injuries, but Giannis had called in again to tell them he was in good hands.
‘I think he still needs proper medical care, Yiayiá,’ Panos responded, realising that his grandmother had not read between the lines.
The situation worsened as ELAS troops arrived in Athens in large numbers and continued the fight against the British forces. Conciliatory offers came from the Prime Minister, Papandreou, saying that he would compromise once the communists had agreed to disarm, but there was no trust between the two sides.
Panos, Kyría Koralis and the two girls spent many more days effectively trapped in the apartment. In the low December light, it was gloomier than ever with the balcony doors still boarded up. They spent most of their time gathered round the radio, which kept them informed of the dramatic events taking place close by.
Papandreou resigned and was replaced by the more fiercely anti-communist General Plastiras. The King, who had remained in exile since the occupation, agreed to delay his return until there had been a referendum on the monarchy. The growing sense of division in the country was already severe enough, without adding to it the presence of the royal family, whose very existence was resented by so many people.
Then came rumours of retreat by ELAS troops. These turned out to be true, as did the information that they were taking hostages with them as they went. They seized thousands and force-marched them into the mountains. Reports of their actions shocked everyone, whether they were on the left or right.
‘It’s barbaric!’ cried Margarita. ‘People are being dragged from their homes and forced to march barefoot. And they’re having to sleep outside in this cold . . .’
‘How can they do that, Panos? How could anyone do such things?’ asked Themis.
‘I don’t know, Themis. There is no excuse. I don’t know what’s got into them.’
‘Desperation?’
suggested Margarita. ‘They know they’re losing.’
Neither Panos nor Themis could disagree, nor could they condone such barbarism. The terror the communists were perpetrating was turning many of their own supporters against them.
In February, a treaty was signed at Varkiza, requiring the communists to release hostages and give up their weapons. Parliamentary elections were also promised for that year. Finally, it seemed that a semblance of their old life might return to the Koralis family.
‘We just need Thanasis home now and everything will be back to normal,’ said Kyría Koralis forcing a smile.
None of them wanted to dent their grandmother’s optimism, but they all knew that there was much to be done before any kind of normality could be re-established. They were expecting Thanasis to be discharged soon, but no one was sure what state he was in. When he might return for duty was also uncertain, but Giannis had told them that he would be entitled to an invalidity allowance.
Neither Kyría Koralis nor her three other grandchildren currently had an income and Panos reflected that the prospect of living off his brother was galling in the extreme. He kept this thought to himself, however, since there was nothing else to keep them all warm and fed.
None of them had been out of the building much in two months but Kyría Koralis had not been out even once. She had not seen at first-hand the terrible destruction that had been perpetrated in the city. Bullets, shells and mines had left indelible scars. Her granddaughters had not even mentioned that both their places of work had been reduced to rubble.
Thanasis was brought home one morning in early March. A police truck dropped him in the square below and painfully, stair by stair, he made the long climb to the third floor.
He had been given a new uniform to wear for his return, but he did not look ready for action. Half of his face was concealed by a dressing and his right arm was strapped up in a sling. He would never again fire a gun, now that two of his fingers were missing.
Kyría Koralis wept when she saw her grandson. He had told Giannis to conceal the extent of his injuries from his family.
‘Oh, my poor boy,’ she cried. ‘What did they do to you?’
Those Who Are Loved Page 15