‘I don’t think it’s for me,’ said Themis, spluttering.
‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ he joked, indicating all the other women around them who were happily smoking.
When one of the men on the truck leaned over to speak to him, Themis realised that the man she had been talking to was the captain of their unit.
‘I hadn’t realised . . .’
‘No reason to apologise,’ he told her. ‘We’re communists here.’
‘But . . .’
Seeing that she was flustered, the captain tried to reassure her.
‘There’s a hierarchy, but no formality,’ he said firmly.
The constant revving and droning of the engine as it struggled to negotiate the broken road, and the other soldiers’ shouting and occasional bursts of singing, did not make it easy to hold a conversation. Themis answered a few questions about her background and wanted to ask the same ones of the man she now knew to be Captain Solomonidis. In the end she only had the courage to ask if he knew where they were going.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course I know. And you’ll find out soon enough.’
It was hard to tell if the evasive answer was lack of trust or policy.
As they talked, they both watched the ruggedly mountainous landscape that they were approaching. Themis did not turn her head to look at the captain but she was aware that the curly-haired soldier, Makris, was opposite, watching them. From time to time she was also aware of a hostile glance from another woman.
The journey passed quickly. Every so often, the lorry would stop for them to stretch their legs and coffee would be brewed on a makeshift stove. It was more like a school outing or a day out in the country, and memories of long-past pleasures returned.
In one village, a woman emerged from her stone cottage with a wreath of fresh flowers. She approached Themis and placed it round her neck, the sweet scent of the colourful, wild sprigs filling the air around her.
Themis realised it must be May Day, but it was not the arrival of summer they were celebrating now.
‘It’s the day for workers’ rights!’ shouted the captain. ‘Dance!’
Whatever was in their minds, they all linked arms and formed a circle. For the first time in years, as the sap seemed to rise from the earth, Themis forgot the sadness that burdened her. Her worries about Panos, the unease about Margarita and her sadness for the crippled Thanasis, all vanished for a few seconds. Not since childhood had she felt a moment of such carefree pleasure.
Then the man whom she could not get out of her mind came across and very deliberately put his arm through hers. Soon they would be marching together, disciplined and in time, but for now their feet moved to a gentler, steady beat as they paced the movements of the dance, a traditional rhythm familiar to them all. It took their minds away from the impending fight.
This is the harmony I want to restore to our country, Themis thought.
The sweetness of the cake brought out to them by the same kind woman who had given Themis the flowers revived all their spirits. Honey dripped from their fingertips as they hungrily devoured every last crumb. Never had any glykó tasted as good.
The captain had a bottle of tsípouro, which he passed round in the dusk, and each soldier took a sip before clambering back on to the lorry, warmed by the dancing and the alcohol. The light was fading and temperatures were dropping as the vehicle began its climb into the mountains.
Themis was at the back of the truck now and once again felt the glare of the woman. She kept her eyes down, not wanting to meet her hostile stare, but was aware, if she looked in the other direction, that Makris was watching her.
To distract herself, Themis talked to Katerina, who was sitting next to her. An hour or so later, her head lolled on to her friend’s shoulder and she fell into a profound and dream-filled sleep.
Woken by the crunch of the lorry’s handbrake and sudden silence from the engine, she sat up and rubbed her eyes.
The back of the lorry was being opened from the outside and one by one the soldiers jumped down, their kitbags thrown down to them by the last person.
The landscape was unfamiliar but as the sun came up she could read the sign. They were just outside a village and Themis was reassured by the sight of the familiar alphabet reminding her that they were back in Greece, the motherland for which they were now trained to fight and liberate.
The plan for the next few days was explained to the unit. The main concern for the present was to secure supplies for the following weeks. The only source was the villagers themselves and not all of them were generous with what they were prepared to give. If they did not hand over enough willingly, then they had to be ‘encouraged’.
Themis knew that this was a euphemism for force but she had to obey orders. This was what she had sworn in the oath and there could be no deviation from the single set of beliefs that now united them.
That night, as she lay under the stars, she remembered how much her family used to argue and debate. There was never a mealtime without altercation, and while she recalled how exasperated her grandmother had often been, she realised now how precious that freedom had been too. They had all been allowed their differences of view.
Beneath her thin blanket, she could feel the sharp edge of every stone. It was the most uncomfortable night she had ever spent. The captain had repeatedly told them that everything was going to get much tougher.
‘This is a holiday compared to what’s coming up,’ he said. ‘There will be a moment when we have to be battle-ready. You will know when that moment comes.’
They marched for the next two nights and then camped again. The following day Themis received instructions about her first mission: the key stages were to raid, to seize supplies and to recruit additional people into the army. Three of them spent the evening clandestinely scouting a nearby village, making estimates of the number of inhabitants, what resources they had, and if there were likely to be any firearms to seize. They reported back that the men of the village appeared to have left and from what they could see the oldest boys there seemed to be around thirteen.
Their unit was up before dawn to surround the village. None of the women and children who lived there had any idea what was happening when they heard the first gunshots that day. It was a rude awakening.
The strategy was to raid as many houses as possible as quickly as possible to instil maximum fear, and then, with a megaphone, instruct the remaining inhabitants to reveal themselves voluntarily (the first group effectively acting as hostages). In general, villagers did not risk jeopardising the lives of the others, so this was a technique that invariably worked, especially when the men had already left the village.
Themis watched the group of fifty or so women and children standing in a huddle by the fountain in the main square, terror written on their faces. The soldiers stood round them in a circle. There were many more villagers than soldiers, but it was a question of who held the power.
The captain took the arm of one of the younger women, pulled her out of the group and interrogated her.
Themis was shocked at his manner. If the girl had personally betrayed him and his country, he could not have been more brutal. When had the men of this village left? And where had they gone?
The girl mumbled a response. This village supported the communists, she claimed, but the fear on her face conveyed the truth.
‘Your mouth says one thing, your eyes another,’ he said. ‘You’re a lying bitch.’
The captain, whom Themis had likened to a kindly bear, struck the girl hard across the face before barking an order to his deputy.
‘Take the old ones into the woods. The kids we’ll leave here. The fit and healthy will come with us. Get them to bring out every last crust before we go. I want to be out of here before noon.’
Instructions were parcelled out to each soldier. Themis was in charge of escorting five of the younger village women from house to house to make them empty cupboards of everything they contained. One o
f them held her baby at her breast as they walked. None of them spoke. All the while, Themis held her rifle by her side. Anyone who tried to escape must be shot, without exception.
Pulses, bread, potatoes, fruit – one by one the items were dropped on to blankets that had been laid out in the village square. Once the process was complete, three blankets were piled high with provisions. They also took the largest pots they could find. There was no point in gathering food without something to cook it in.
A separate group was dispatched to hunt for arms and, in several houses, rifles were found. Some of them had been buried under a dirt floor, others were hidden inside a child’s cot. Little ammunition was found, which might explain why the village had not been able to defend itself when their unit had arrived.
No one spoke. The only sound that broke the silence was the wail of the baby whose desperate cries began to grate on Themis’ nerves.
‘Why don’t you go and sit with the children and . . .’
‘Thank you,’ the mother said gratefully.
She walked away towards the children who stood together in a tight circle under a plane tree, watched over by Katerina. Even the children who were naturally so boisterous simply stared down at the dirt.
Themis’ job was almost complete. Each house that they emptied had a cross scratched on the door. All forty were now marked in this way and she shepherded the women back to the village square.
The rest of the unit had reappeared. Only three out of a dozen of the older women were with them.
The blankets with food were tied up into bundles and strapped to a pair of mules that had been found.
‘Leave the old ones here. And the one with the baby. She’ll hold us up,’ ordered Makris.
‘What about the children?’ Katerina asked. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’
Makris looked at her with disdain but not just because she had spoken out of turn. Everyone else seemed to know what awaited the children.
‘Four of you will march these children north,’ he said.
There was a murmur among the soldiers. They had just come from the north.
Makris quickly selected the four who would be undertaking this journey.
‘Where are they being taken?’ whispered Themis to Katerina who was standing next to her.
Her friend shook her head. They surmised, soon enough, that the children were going to Bulgaria and would be taught how to be good communists.
‘The older ones will come with us,’ Makris continued. ‘They’ll soon learn to fight.’
The captain scrutinised the group of children for one final time. There was a boy of about thirteen, solid, with square shoulders. Themis calculated that he was heavier than most of the women.
‘You!’ barked Solomonidis. ‘On your feet. You’ll come with us.’
The young women, all of them mothers, were penned in at gunpoint twenty metres away and many of the children were crying now as they realised what was going to happen.
They were not allowed to say goodbye to their mothers.
‘The sooner we get out of here the better,’ said Katerina under her breath. ‘I can’t stand all their noise.’
What had begun as a few whimpers from one or two children had turned into wailing from them all and their distress spread to their mothers. One of them tried to break free. She was the one closest to Themis.
Themis found herself with a gun pressed hard into the woman’s chest. She was shrieking now, hysterical. Nothing was going to come between her and her child.
‘Dimitri!’ she screamed.
Her fury gave her the strength to push Themis aside and Themis found herself on the ground as the woman broke free and ran towards her child.
The captain acted quickly and raised his weapon, firing a single shot into her back.
The crack of the bullet silenced everyone. The sight of a mother collapsing lifeless in front of her son shocked them all. For a moment no one moved.
The still body was a reminder to them all, both captives and soldiers, that they must obey orders. Themis was aware that she had let the group down by allowing the woman to break free and instantly began to fear the repercussions. Almost immediately afterwards, she felt guilty that this was her first thought rather than sorrow that an innocent woman had been executed, and she realised that her way of thinking was already changing. This was a war and she was a fighter now.
Within a few moments, there was a flurry of renewed activity. It was a matter of urgency to leave now. The village women had to form a line and the soldiers started dividing them into groups. Some began to sob once again.
The official story was that the older women were to be left guarded for an hour and the soldiers that were keeping them in check would then make a swift exit from the village to catch up with the rest of the unit.
Themis was among the first group to leave, but she heard the instructions given by the captain to the two soldiers being left to guard the women. Before leaving, he told them, they should bury the yéroi, the old ones, in the wood.
Themis was familiar with the idea of people being punished for the sins of their fathers, but these mothers were going to pay for the sins of sons. Even being related to a member of the government army had made them suspects. The realisation that some of these simple village women would be slaughtered by her fellow soldiers sickened Themis, but she had sworn the oath now and was committed to act as instructed.
Looking at the ground, she cast everything out of her mind except for the order she had been given: to start marching the youngest among the women away from their village. Like them, she must put one foot in front of the other and perhaps, after a while, the hypnotic rhythm would cut out feeling and thought. Although nothing had yet been said, she knew that she had made a foolish error and would be under scrutiny now.
The operation on the village had taken less than four hours. It was one o’clock and the target for the remainder of the day was to march approximately thirty kilometres south. If the terrain had been flat this might have been easily achieved, but they were in the mountains and many of the village women were poorly shod. They walked for six hours, stopping for only five minutes at a time, once to take some water (sourced at a communist-friendly village en route) and once to eat some bread and fruit. Both soldiers and captives ate the same amount on the journey. The captives would soon become soldiers too and needed decent nourishment.
Themis’ legs moved mechanically and her stomach was hollow. It was difficult to concentrate. If any one of the women in her charge had the will or energy to escape, she would succeed. Themis did not have the strength even to lift her gun.
For the last few hours of daylight, they were trekking through dense forest. Sunlight barely penetrated the canopy of leaves high above them and it was hard to make out the path ahead. It was the captain who led the march and who made the decision to stop. They had reached a clearing and there was a stream running nearby and space for them all to sleep for the night.
Themis was relieved of her duty of guarding a group of captives but her work was not done. She was assigned the job of wood gathering with Katerina and two of the men. Within twenty minutes, a fire was blazing and the team who was preparing ingredients from the provisions that had been gathered earlier that day was ready to start cooking. Thirty of them soon began to eat and the bean stew disappeared fast. Each of them had a tin bowl and a cup. Once the soldiers had eaten, the bowls were washed in the stream and the new ‘recruits’ were handed their rations. There was no sound except for the urgent ting-ting of spoons on metal.
Themis could not help watching and wondering as the women ate. In spite of their state of mourning and loss, hunger was still a powerful urge. They ate to stay alive. Already the events of the morning seemed many days ago.
Once the food was finished and the fire had died down, every last flake of ash was buried so that they left no trace.
Before being allocated their place to sleep for the night, they must listen to the cap
tain. First, he addressed the grieving women.
‘You have joined the rightful heirs to the future of Greece. This army is leading us towards a new Greece, free of tyranny, free of the influence of the Nazis. Your menfolk have left you to fight for the government, for the forces of fascism and evil. Think of this: they left you. We give you the chance to fight. To fight like men. To be treated as equals.’
Moonlight shone into the clearing and illuminated the pale faces and blank eyes of the village women. One or two of them wept. Themis could not help thinking of Frosso and the brutality that she must have witnessed. Would any of these women be driven to commit the same acts?
Solomonidis then addressed the rest of the unit.
‘Tomorrow brings us closer to our goal. To establish a new Greece. A free Greece. Today we have a bigger army. Every day we are expanding our numbers and soon the whole of Greece will be ours.’
His deputy then stepped forward.
‘Tonight we must rest. There is another long march tomorrow. But as usual we must have you all doing your part to keep watch.’
Makris began to read out names and even while he was doing so, Themis felt her eyelids closing. Her whole body longed for sleep.
‘Koralis!’
It was her punishment for what had happened earlier in the day. She was to be on night watch. Her name was one of ten. Five were assigned the task of keeping guard over the new recruits and five were positioned at various distances around the camp. Guerrilla groups were always vulnerable. They were expert at surprise attack but there was always the possibility that the government army might start practising the same technique.
Themis was sent to the furthest point. Three hundred strides south. That was the instruction. And she followed it precisely.
Well out of earshot of the main camp, Themis found herself almost drowning in the darkness. She had rarely experienced such silence and it weighed heavily on her, like loneliness. All she could hear was her own breath.
She sat on the ground, with her back against a tree, looking away from the direction of the camp. Occasionally she imagined a rustle of leaves, perhaps a rabbit or mouse, and heard the flapping of wings beneath the treetops. Themis had spent so little time out of Athens during her life that she was unfamiliar with the noises of the forest and her ears were sensitised to even the smallest sounds.
Those Who Are Loved Page 19