Themis could see a barren stretch of land ahead but it was impossible to tell how far away it lay. Half an hour passed as the boat struggled across the waves. Neither she nor her siblings had ever learnt to swim and, moreover, none of them would have a chance even if the boat sank close to the shore.
As they lurched up and down and side to side, lower and lower in the water, she was overpowered by nausea. Several others were already vomiting over the side.
The man sitting next to her could see Themis’ face turning green.
‘Keep looking at the horizon,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t take your eye off it. We’re almost there.’
‘Where . . .?’
The boat was being pulled into a pier and tied up by several uniformed men.
Suddenly Themis saw the flash of a blade in the sunlight and her state of numbness turned to fear. A knife was passed down to the helmsman and, rocking the boat almost to the point of capsize, he reached out to the closest of his ‘passengers’ and cut through the rope that bound his hands. One by one, as their arms were freed, the sodden prisoners disembarked.
Themis turned to look at the landscape that lay in front of them. There were words marked out on the hills in huge white stones.
ZITO O VASILIAS
LONG LIVE THE KING
Her head was clearing. She had seen photographs of this place. Everyone knew of its reputation. It was the most notoriously brutal of all the island prisons. Makronisos.
Chapter Fifteen
ARRIVAL IN THIS barren place seemed just another test of endurance and Themis told herself that she would survive.
‘Long Live the King’. Even the tone of the message on the hillside seemed comparatively mild, compared with slogans that had been hurled at her in past months: accusations of bandit, slut and whore.
Men and women were divided and soldiers barked out instructions. The men were the first to march beneath a giant archway. Themis took in the words written above their heads:
I MAKRONISOS SAS KALOSORIZEI
MAKRONISOS WELCOMES YOU
She had heard many stories about Makronisos. All of them were second-hand and she now wondered if they had been exaggerated. After more than a year living rough as a soldier, followed by the horrors of prison, the sight of ordered rows of tents enough to accommodate tens of thousands was almost welcome. They rose up the hillsides in every direction, fanning out into the distance as far as the eye could see. In her state of weariness, her only thought was that perhaps there might even be something other than hard ground to lie on.
Many years before, on one of the few occasions their father had taken them out of Athens, she and her siblings had gone to Cape Sounion. She recalled looking across the sea towards the barren, colourless island in front of them. ‘Uninhabitable and uninhabited’ was how her father had described it and she could hear his almost dismissive words even now.
Nowadays it clearly was inhabited and, as she soon learnt, new legislation had been passed, allowing the island to take in women as well as men for ‘correction’.
The place teemed mostly with young government soldiers, smartly dressed in pale uniforms, well shaved, hair neatly clipped. It looked like a well-organised army camp, not the bare, empty island she had always imagined. It was full of noise: music, announcements, shouts, the chanting of priests.
Themis searched the crowd for the two faces she longed to see. With such a sizeable population, perhaps Tasos or even Panos might be here, and if they were not here yet, there was a possibility that they might arrive. Even now as she looked out to sea, there was another small boat making its way across the choppy waters and her spirits rose a little.
A nudge in the ribs broke her reverie.
‘Come on,’ her neighbour urged. ‘Our turn.’
It was time for their group to make an official entrance. As they passed beneath the archway, a blast of military brass fanfared them. Her stomach still churning from the roughness of the sea and her eyes dazzled by the low sun, Themis struggled to make sense of what was going on around her.
On the other side of the archway, everything seemed to change. She stumbled across the stony ground, the wind whipping dust and grit into her eyes, nose and mouth. Announcements were being broadcast through a loudspeaker but they were incomprehensible and clashed with the sound of brass and drums.
Narrowing her eyes and keeping her face to the ground, Themis followed the feet in front of her. At one point she looked up to see one woman being mercilessly whipped by another. A group of male soldiers was observing and laughing. It seemed to be purely for their entertainment.
‘You are nothing! Do you hear me?’
The victim was cowering from the blows, neither screaming nor crying. Her silence only made her seem more vulnerable.
‘Eísai ethnomíasma! You are a germ! A germ that will destroy our nation.’
Themis looked away, feeling vicarious shame for the unknown woman. She did not want to add her own stares to those of the people jeering and hurling abuse.
‘Symmorítissa!’ some of them shrieked at her. ‘Bandit!’
‘Bulgarian!’ shouted some others.
Themis noticed the joshing between the assailant and one of the men, whose trousers were falling down around his ankles.
‘And you’re a thief too,’ he cackled. ‘Give me back my belt!’
The whipping stopped as the woman doing the beating returned his belt to him.
Everyone in the group held their sides with laughter.
Themis turned away and continued to trudge. Ten or fifteen minutes passed before she looked up again. As she did, she noticed the cold eyes of the men who passed in the opposite direction. Their lack of expression was chilling.
When they finally came to a halt, Themis’ group of twenty was lined up before a figure who was waiting to address them. With the sun setting behind him, all they could see was a silhouette.
‘Welcome,’ he said before a dramatic pause. ‘Alas, each one of you has stepped from the natural ways of womankind.’
The voice was deep and disarmingly gentle.
‘But you are the lucky ones. Here on this island, we can help bring you back to the right path. You will acknowledge the errors you have made and repent of your ways. Don’t think of this place as a prison but as a place for correction.’
There was not a single murmur of dissent. His tone was kind, contrasting dramatically with the cruelty and abuse that was all they had heard in past weeks and months. Themis listened to the words carefully.
The speech continued but the tone changed to one of ex-hortation.
‘There is only one path home, only one route to reunion with your family. It is very simple.’
Then they heard a new word. From now on they would hear it so often that it would be like a breath or a noise.
‘You will all sign a dílosi. And when you do, you will go home to where you belong. Your families will be waiting with open arms.’
Dílosi metanoías. A declaration of repentance. Dílosi, dílosi, dílosi . . . The word would ring in their ears.
Themis found it ridiculous. She would never repent of fighting for her rights, against a regime where so many had collaborated with the Nazis.
Pointing towards Cape Sounion, the speaker came to the climax of his speech.
‘Imagine yourselves back on the mainland. Your consciences clear. Women once again. Fully Greek. Fully alive.’
He paused for a moment, almost as if he expected applause, then turned away and marched back towards the sea.
His pseudo concern was soon replaced by the overt cruelty of their female guards.
Marched to a tent that would be shared by fifty of them, they were given thin cotton dresses and Themis found herself struggling to do up the buttons, her fingers were so frozen by the cold. She did not ask anyone for help. This time she would try to limit the possibilities of pain and loss. There would be no Katerina.
Their tatty communist army uniforms were left in a pile ou
tside the tent and later that day Themis watched as the trousers of which she had been so proud were put in a pile with others, set on fire and reduced to ash.
At first, some of the women assigned to guard their tent were kind enough and Themis soon realised that they were prisoners who had already signed a dílosi. Their mission was to encourage their charges to do the same.
The majority of the women in Themis’ tent were stubborn, and none would easily turn her back on her beliefs. Many of them had recently been transferred to Makronisos from Trikeri and they regarded themselves as the hardest to crack. They even looked different, their lined faces deeply scored by sun and wind.
Themis had experienced the brutality of a policeman’s whip and a soldier’s boot but now she and the others were subjected to periods of pointless and gruelling labour. Day after day, they were forced to carry rocks from one location to another.
When the sun started to go down, physical work ended and indoctrination began, including the obligatory singing of patriotic songs and marching. It was a daily requirement to sit for hours on end in the huge concrete stadium. Unprotected from the fierce wind that constantly battered this barren rock and unpredictable showers of hail and heavy rain, they listened to the droning voices of their captors. What Themis hated most of all were the haranguing speeches they were subjected to, but she had long ago developed a way of shutting down her senses, appearing to concentrate while not really hearing. At least these hours gave them some repose and Themis obligingly stood when necessary to sing, separating thought from action as she had practised with Fotini.
The women in the tent reinforced each other’s resolve. ‘Never, never, never,’ they said under their breath so that the others could hear. And at night the whisper went up and down the tent: ‘Never, never, never’. Never would they turn their backs on their comrades. Never would they turn their backs on their communist ideals. Never would they sign the dílosi.
Within a few days, Themis had grasped the layout of Makronisos. There were separate zones, one for those who had not repented, one for those who were on their way to ‘rehabilitation’ and a third for those who had signed the dílosi.
Alpha, Beta, Gamma were the names of the zones. A, B, C. One, two, three. They were told that these were also the simple steps they must take to cleanse themselves, to be reborn.
In a state of weariness, Themis followed the flow of the day. Along with the thousands of other prisoners everything was done in timed shifts including the daily visits to the cold, charmless cathedral, which had been quickly built out of concrete in the centre of the island.
‘They expect us to pray?’ muttered one of Themis’ group. ‘I will pray for the death of our guards. That’s all I will pray for.’
She was overheard by one of the guards and Themis never saw her again.
A subtler form of torture was the relentless noise. Not only were there constant announcements over the Tannoy, orders barked in their faces and the screams of the tortured, but on some days music blared from the loudspeakers without interruption. Nationalist songs, military bands and snatches of orchestral music were played over and over again.
One of the women who slept close to Themis was taken one night and buried up to her neck in the sand outside. The following morning they all had to file past her. It was a form of torture designed to terrorise them all.
After that the woman lost her sanity. All the humiliation and physical abuse to which she had been subjected did not seem to have affected her as much as the relentless blast of music. She stood up one night and began to scream, her hands clamped over her ears.
‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’
Her shrieks attracted the guards who came into the tent and pulled her out. Such a protest gave them the perfect excuse to punish her again.
For the first time, Themis realised that all music needed silence to have meaning. Without pause it was simply noise.
A few days later, for no apparent reason, the music stopped. The unpredictability of the decision was almost equally nerve-racking, giving no reassurance that this particular torment might not recommence any time.
Every so often, the prisoners were handed a copy of the island’s magazine, celebrating the signing of repentances, reporting on government army activities and showing photographs of Queen Frederika on a tour of the children’s homes she had opened. Her sunny, well-fed demeanour beamed out from the page, making Themis’ temperature rise in spite of the cold. The woman seemed well-meaning, but Themis could not forgive her for so blatantly supporting the right.
Sometimes, when their guards and torturers wanted time off for themselves, the women were encouraged to do some needlework.
‘Womanly handicrafts, that’s what we do while they take a break,’ muttered one of the longer-term ‘inmates’ sarcastically to Themis.
Sewing had been a passion of her sister’s but Themis had always been averse to it and everything it seemed to represent. Reluctantly, she selected a square of the discoloured linen from a pile, threaded her needle with cotton and sat down on the stony ground outside the tent. She chose red.
Nobody was shouting, no one was bullying, there was just the noise of the wind as it rattled the branches in some twisted trees.
Fifty women sat in silence. The woman next to Themis had a cloth spread across her lap. It was edged with a pleasing symmetrical pattern like a row of zigzags.
‘Look,’ whispered its owner, orienting the cloth so that Themis could see it from another angle.
Themis was impressed. Now she could see that the pattern comprised an acronym repeated all the way round the outside. ELASELASELASELAS.
‘And in the middle, I will also sew the name of our motherland, ELLAS. But I’ll spell it wrong there too . . .’
The girl, who was much younger than Themis, smiled mis-chievously.
Embroidering the initials of the communist resistance army, ELAS, for whom the girl’s three brothers had died, was one of the many small rebellions taking place around her. In the guise of traditional island patterns, Themis saw birds in flight and ships in full sail. ‘They represent our freedom,’ explained one woman. Such acts of subversion achieved little but kept their spirits from dying.
Themis sat for some time, staring at the white square on her lap. In theory the subject for their embroidery must be something that celebrated the motherland. She loved her patrída as vehemently as the guards who kept her here and she was determined to show it.
Having knotted the thread, she pierced the fabric from the underside, and to her great satisfaction saw the point of the needle appear right at the very centre, exactly where she wanted it. From here, she began to embroider the outline of a heart. She could say it represented her love for Greece and for her family but with every stitch she would think of Tasos. She had felt so complete in the mountains with him and wondered if that’s what Plato had meant when he talked of the Other Half. She certainly felt she had been cut in two. Her dream of being reunited with the man she loved at least gave her hope for something, and each time the point of the needle pierced the cloth and she pulled the scarlet thread through, she imagined herself pulling him closer.
For the first time, she understood the pleasure of sewing. The concentration took her mind away from her situation, and the small size of her hands, which had sometimes been a disadvantage when handling a gun, was now a benefit.
As the months passed, the days grew longer and hotter. Themis was becoming progressively more exhausted by the days of hard labour and was often beaten for slacking. Needlework was the only activity for which she had energy. One of the women was lamenting that her periods had ceased, making it only two of the fifty women in the tent who still menstruated. Some were relieved to find themselves spared the monthly curse, but others feared that it would never return. Themis remembered how Fotini’s periods had stopped and malnutrition had long since done the same to her.
All day, she felt the sun beating down on her neck and at night lay on her bed in a deliri
um of nausea and discomfort. She could not sleep. It was then that she heard screams. They were not the screams of a woman, but of a man. A high-pitched squeal such as a wounded animal might make. Torture on the island had intensified. The government authorities were not satisfied by the number of dílosis being signed on Makronisos and had demanded an improvement in results.
One night, without warning, three guards came into their tent and dragged one of the women away. They did not take her far. The guards wanted the others to hear everything so that they could imagine what was being done to their victim.
Her screams traumatised Themis and when, an hour later, the woman was roughly pushed back into the tent, she was almost too nervous to look.
Whimpering, the woman fell to the ground and for a moment lay still, naked and curled into a foetal position. Three others quickly gathered around her and one began tearing up a sheet getting ready to bathe her wounds.
‘Theé kai kýrie! Look at her feet!’ Themis heard one of them saying. ‘They’ve destroyed them.’
That day the woman lay motionless on her thin mat, a reminder to all the others of their potential fate. The following night there was another victim and on each subsequent night another. Rape was common, but some returned without fingernails and others were beaten with socks full of stones or had cigarette burns on their breasts. Each one was evidence of what happened if you refused to sign the dílosi.
No one could ever predict the precise time when the flap of the tent would be flung open and the next victim randomly chosen. Themis remembered how she used to feign sleep to try to make herself invisible to Margarita and the night that the sound of heavy army boots stopped next to her bed, she squeezed her eyes tight shut, hoping, praying, willing it not to be her turn.
Resistance to violence of any kind was pointless. She slipped her feet into her boots and walked calmly between the two guards, trying to breathe, telling herself to be brave. So often she had rehearsed how she would react when her time came. She would try to think of the sweetest things she knew, of Tasos, of his lips, of her unfinished heart.
Those Who Are Loved Page 22