“He was like one of the family!” Eleni said, trying to explain her grief. “When you were babies, he carried you. He went through the war with us.”
Olga pointed out that the carcass would stiffen quickly, and they’d never fit it through the door of the stable. Eleni sent Fotini for Andreas and began tying a rope under the animal’s forelegs. When her brother-in-law came, they managed to drag the corpse out the door, the legs bumping awkwardly against the doorjamb, but once they reached the rocky path, they couldn’t budge it any further.
Still shaking with sobs, Eleni tied another rope around Merjo’s hind legs and directed Olga and Kanta, who had been found hiding in the outhouse, to start pulling. The mule’s body jackknifed, and with much yanking and angry shouting, they managed to force him through the gate. By now most of the neighborhood had come out to see the reason for the uproar and began shouting encouragement.
It was only about three hundred yards up and over to a great cliff on the western edge of the village, but it took an hour to inch the great white carcass that far. Olga and Andreas were laughing while the others wept. The neighbors followed behind like a real funeral procession.
As they dragged the mule to the edge, Fotini’s playmate, seven-year-old Alexandra Bollis, came down the path and took in the lugubrious scene. She had been taught by her mother what to say in such situations. She came up to the family, who were drenched with sweat and breathing hard. “May his death bring you life and may he prepare the way to Paradise ahead of you,” she chirped solemnly, extending her hand to Eleni. The onlookers burst out laughing and Eleni threw back her head and laughed with them, tears still wet on her face.
They all crouched down facing the ravine, put their hands on Merjo’s back, and with one last “Heave!” pushed him over the edge. At first it seemed he wouldn’t go, then slowly, as a shower of stones preceded him into the great emptiness, the mule rolled majestically off the cliff and revolved in the air, legs extended like twigs. Over and over he turned, diminishing in size until, with the dull sound of a wine skin, he settled into the underbrush far below, and a cloud of dust and startled birds flew up in his wake. There he lay, until the vultures and crows picked his bones clean.
In July, Eleni was distracted from the gloom caused by Merjo’s death and the estrangement with her father by the news of Stavroula Yakou’s engagement.
Stavroula was the tallest and handsomest maiden in the village, but no one expected her to marry, for her family was at the bottom of the social ladder, and she had no hope of a decent dowry. When Stavroula was only seven, her father, Panayiotis, a tinker, had gone on a working trip to Kalambaka at the foot of the great Meteora crags and discovered that there were women there with perfumed hair and oiled bodies who would give him sex for money. That’s when Panayiotis decided not to return to Lia and his rough-skinned wife Anastasia.
Anastasia had barely managed to keep herself and the two little girls alive doing housekeeping and farming chores for others. The sight of her knocking on doors and begging for work had always filled Eleni with a sympathetic terror, imagining herself in the same position. Before the war cut off her money, she regularly hired Anastasia to help with the chores and never passed her house without dropping off a gift of oil or sugar.
Because of her poverty and her father’s scandalous behavior, Stavroula seemed destined to become an old maid, but besides being a beauty, Stavroula was a woman of spirit, and if there was any escape from her plight, she meant to find it.
Salvation presented itself in the person of Dimitri Dangas, who had grown up in a house only five hundred yards from Stavroula’s but now worked in a bakery in Khalkis on the Euboean Straits, fifty miles north of Athens. Dimitri, a tall, polite, personable lad, was younger than Stavroula, and one of the few in the village even taller than she was. He had curly black hair and high cheekbones, and his father, who had a tinker’s shop in Khalkis, had managed to find him the fine job in the bakery, a guarantee of security—for who had ever heard of a baker starving?
Dimitri had come home for a visit during the annual festival of the Prophet Elias and happened to pass by the millstream where on Saturday mornings the women of the Perivoli gathered to boil, beat and wash their laundry while they caught up on the latest gossip.
His eyes were drawn to the figure of Stavroula, beating some homespun dresses on the ferny bank. Her sleeves were rolled up, and the sun, filtering through the overhanging plane trees, touched the golden fuzz on her round arms as she raised and lowered the flat paddle. Her kerchief had slipped back, and wisps of her hair clung moistly to her cheeks. Gold against white, Dimitri thought, like the gilded crusty loaves he made from the finest white flour. He stepped on a dry stick, and Stavroula turned around, leveling on him the full force of her azure eyes. He was as hopelessly bewitched as if she had fed him a love potion made of the combined milk taken from a mother and daughter who were both nursing at the same time.
Dimitri waited by Stavroula’s gate for her to pass with the freshly laundered clothes. She did not snub his greeting, despite her mother’s admonitions, for she sensed an opportunity.
Soon Stavroula was finding frequent need to visit her girl friends or go to the outhouse at night, and during moments snatched from these outings, she and Dimitri would meet. Because she knew that his parents would oppose the match, Stavroula advised Dimitri to come personally to ask her mother for her hand instead of sending a go-between. He went, and despite the unorthodoxy of having a groom speak for himself, poor Anastasia was only too glad to promise her twenty-two-year-old daughter to this handsome man who did not mention a dowry.
When presented with the fact of her son’s engagement, Dimitri’s mother, Alexandra Dangas, wept, pleaded and threatened. She wrote his father in Khalkis, who wrote back: “Of all the respectable doors that there are in Lia, couldn’t you have found one to knock on?”
But Dimitri could see no farther than the blue depths of Stavroula’s eyes. He threatened to take his love with him and go away forever if his parents didn’t agree to the marriage. His mother rapidly gave ground at this threat. To never see Dimitri again would be death itself! She forced herself to look on the bright side of things: Stavroula was a big, strong girl. She would make fine grandchildren and be useful around the house. It was time for her to reap the rewards due a mother-in-law after all those decades of slavery.
The mother-in-law was the cross that every Greek village bride had to bear, taking comfort in the knowledge that, God willing, someday she would be a mother-in-law herself. It was customary in Lia for the bride to spend her wedding night sleeping not with her new husband, but with his mother, to dramatize whose property she was.
“My mother-in-law’s speaking of me,” a Greek wife says as she chops onions and tears run down her face. Mothers-in-law were notoriously cruel to the brides brought home by their sons. One of Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ cousins, Tassia, was a daughter-in-law of the most infamous mother-in-law in the village, Kostena Makos, whose sons had brought three brides to her house, all of whom went about the village permanently marked with bruises from their mother-in-law’s poker.
The first person Anastasia Yakou told of her daughter’s miraculous engagement was Eleni Gatzoyiannis. The two old friends embraced and Anastasia’s joy overflowed in a tear or two. “We both know what it is to bring up girls without a husband to guide and protect them,” Anastasia said. “You’ve always helped us, Eleni. Stavroula wants to have your Nikola to be the boy who sits on the dowry chest and Olga as the ‘fortunate girl’ to decorate the wedding breads.”
Eleni was moved that her children had been selected for these important roles, and volunteered to make the bride’s wedding dress herself from a piece of fine wool that Christos had sent them.
The cooking began a week before the wedding, and on Wednesday the women of the neighborhood prepared the dough for the six huge wedding breads. On Thursday the breads were brought to the Gatzoyiannis house, fat and round as millstones, and Olga, using two spoons
, “embroidered” the tops of each one with crosses and lovers’ knots, wild roses and doves, studding the patterns with Jordan almonds for fertility.
On Saturday the married women gathered at the groom’s house to sing and make bawdy jokes as they prepared the nuptial bed, turning each sleeping rug in the four directions of the cross before laying it in place. Finally the bed was sprinkled with rice and sweet-smelling flowers, and Nikola was placed in the middle—terrified at being the center of so much hilarious fun—while the women threw silver coins, or copper coins if they could afford no other, onto the mattress. Nitsa tucked some cloves of garlic among the blankets and whispered to Nikola that if Stavroula had a baby boy first, it would be thanks to the magic he was making.
The wedding day dawned bright and mild as the bride’s family and friends began to dress Stavroula in the full-skirted dress of a brilliant mulberry color. Eleni had included a secret inner pocket to hold the three magic objects: the scissors, the padlock and the comb, which would protect the bride against the evil eye. The great spiral belt buckle of silver filigree that her mother had worn was fastened about Stavroula’s trim waist, and over the dress went the black satin apron, embroidered in gold. Stavroula’s wheat-colored hair had been plaited down her back by an old woman of many fruitful years; her burgundy flowered wedding kerchief, with a few Turkish florins sewed to its corners, was tied over her head and behind her ears so that the blond hair made an aureole around her face. Last of all they helped her into the long black sleeveless tunic, which reached to the hem of her dress and bore a vertical red stripe. Everyone was astonished at Stavroula’s composure and remarked that she was the first bride they’d ever seen who did not weep on this, the most significant and terrifying day of her life.
The members of the groom’s party were stoking their spirits with moonshine in preparation for the ritual kidnapping of the bride. Finally the best man, satisfied with Dimitri’s appearance, dusted off his suit, stuck a sprig of sweet basil behind his ear, and announced, “The eagle flies to take the partridge!”
With a shout, the groom’s party launched the siege; at their head was the banner of war—a Greek flag with a crosspiece at the top bearing three oranges for fruitfulness and an olive branch tied with a white handkerchief for harmony. The crowd intoned stanzas of the melancholy klephtic wedding songs in a slow and long-drawn roar, ending with a mournful rising wail, sounding more like a dirge than an epithalamion.
Hearing the clamor of the approaching groom’s party, the women in the bride’s house seized Nikola, dressed in his new suit and uncomfortable American shoes, and set him on top of the wooden chest to protect the bride’s trousseau from the invading groom until it was properly ransomed. The boy was frowning with the magnitude of his responsibility while everyone else was laughing with excitement—even the bride. Within minutes the groom’s army was in the Yakou courtyard wailing:
We’ve come to take our bride
And if you don’t give us our prize
We’ll take her by force!
Inside, Anastasia seized Eleni’s hand, overcome by nerves, as the bride’s party trumpeted:
My mother’s marrying me
I’m not coming by force!
Anastasia controlled her trembling and formally invited the groom to come in and claim his bride.
Stavroula stood to greet him, glowing like an icon. The older women crossed themselves as they saw her smile at her husband-to-be. Stavroula was leaving her mother’s house and her childhood behind, and this was a time for weeping, not smiles.
Nikola sat fiercely, arms folded, on top of the chest as the groom approached. Dimitri, splendid in his dark suit, formally handed three coins to the boy, and Nikola allowed himself to be lifted down while the groom’s men carried the wedding chest and the linens out to the flower-wreathed mule waiting at the door.
The bride’s party followed the groom’s to the church, keening alternate stanzas of sad wedding songs. At the crossroads between her family’s house and the groom’s, Stavroula stopped and turned, throwing the first wedding bread, aiming it at Olga, who caught it amid much joking and congratulations.
In the church Stavroula knelt, head bowed, as the best man placed the ribbon-linked orange-blossom crowns on the couple’s heads. Even her future mother-in-law had to admit she had never seen a bride so beautiful. But when the moment came for the priest to lead the couple in the dance of Isaiah, and for the groom to stamp on the bride’s toes to underscore his dominance, Stavroula slyly pulled back her foot. Dimitri’s shoe came down loudly on the floor, wringing a gasp from the shocked crowd.
At the feast, held in the groom’s courtyard, the whole village riotously celebrated not just the wedding of poor Stavroula, but the end of hunger, want and war. Glasses clanked joyfully, miraculously filling as soon as they were drained. There was the crunch of hewn bones as the roasted kids were carved, the eyes saved for the groom to give him strength. Eleni watched the acrobatics of the younger men as they took the handkerchief to lead the dances, clearly trying to impress Olga, who sat demurely next to her mother.
Later many of those who attended Stavroula’s wedding said that they felt at the time a sense of foreboding, for such an outpouring of happiness could only augur approaching tragedy. But they were just expressing the national sense of fatality that all Greeks feel when they are happiest; the reason they spit when confronted with good fortune, and cover the mirrors and seal the doors when heaven gives them a son. They know that the fates have some evil up their sleeves to counterbalance such blessings. This cynicism is so universally Greek that it even has a name: baskania.
As the revelers sang the fierce and melancholy wedding songs, their heads flung backward, eyes half closed, veins throbbing in temples and throats, the bride and groom took their places at the head of the line, followed in turn by their best man and parents. After Anastasia Yakou made her round, she went over and pulled Eleni up to lead a slow, graceful syrto. When she sat down again, her cousin, Eugenia Bollis, Mitsi’s wife, remarked acidly, “Enjoy yourself now, Eleni. When the third round comes, others will lead the dance.”
Eleni took no offense but looked at her cousin blankly. “What third round?” she asked. But Eugenia didn’t answer.
The thousands of ELAS partisans who fled Greece after the Varkiza agreement, seeking sanctuary in the Communist countries to the north, were collecting by the fall of 1945 in the town of Bulkes, Yugoslavia, north of Belgrade. There, Moscow-trained Greeks were building a model community of the purest Stalinist orthodoxy.
The exiles in Bulkes were organized into five-man cells of Kafkaesque paranoia for the purpose of informing on one another. The ELAS military heroes who had won glory and popular followings during the occupation were treated especially harshly by the hard-liners who ran the camps, for fear that their popularity would make them feel they could defy the party leaders. The slightest questioning of camp discipline was considered treason, and there were frequent purges of those who wavered, who were labeled “earthworms.” Twenty such suspects were made to walk a gauntlet of spitting men before being sent back to Greece and certain capture.
For the mistrusted, not even a trip to the outhouse in Bulkes could take place without the whole five-man cell present, the two most “secure” members walking on the outside with the most suspect man in the middle. When civil war broke out again in early 1946, the exiles, unlike Communists who had stayed behind in Greek cities, leaped at the chance to go back to Greece and demonstrate their zeal, fighting in the mountains.
The reprise of the civil war began with a change in policy by the Greek Communist Party. Although legal under the Varkiza agreement, the party was finding it hard to gain strength by political action within the rightist governments in Athens. At the UN Security Council on January 21, 1946, Russia condemned persecutions of leftists in Greece—1,219 of them had been killed and 18,767 arrested since the Varkiza agreement—and the Greek Communists took this as proof that Russia would throw its support behind a
new armed rebellion in the country.
The leader of the Greek communists was Nikos Zachariadis, a doctrinaire Communist who had been born in Asia Minor in 1902. Trained in Moscow in his youth, he became Greek Communist Party leader in 1934, survived imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp and returned to Greece in 1945 to retake command of the party.
Against the advice of other European Communists, Zachariadis, a strong-willed man with a thick bush of black curly hair and a determined jaw, decided to go ahead with the rebellion after party leaders met with Yugoslav and Bulgarian representatives in December of 1945 and were promised material aid for an armed insurrection in Greece.
He ordered a boycott of the first postwar Greek elections, scheduled for March 31, 1946, and sent a message to the party organization in Macedonia to plan an armed attack on a target of its choice on the eve of the elections. Markos Vafiadis, a leader of the Macedonian committee and later commander of guerrilla forces, chose the town of Litochoron, where three ELAS officials had been disemboweled, as their target.
An armed group of thirty-three men, all but four of them natives of the town, entered Litochoron on March 30 and opened fire on its defenders—an army platoon, which quickly surrendered, and a detachment of rural police, which held out until their barracks were set on fire and twelve of their men were killed. The guerrillas retreated without a scratch when British troops approached.
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