Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  As two constables hurriedly buried a cache of weapons behind the police station, they looked up to see the thin, sunburned, sardonic face of seventeen-year-old Andreas Michopoulos, hovering over them from atop the wall that separated the police station from the house that had been the British commando headquarters. Andreas Michopoulos was the bad egg among the boys of Lia, the one always suspected if someone’s apricot tree had been stripped or a flock stampeded by a well-aimed rock. “He’s a devil!” Andreas’ mother often said, crossing herself. “I can break the broomstick beating him one day and the next he’ll get in worse trouble.”

  The constables were not happy to find Andreas watching them bury the guns. The young troublemaker could be counted on to reveal the hiding place to the guerrillas just for spite.

  “You’d better come along with us to Filiates, Andreas!” called the sergeant, motioning to the boy to come out from behind the wall. “You’re just the right age for the guerrillas to conscript you the minute they lay eyes on you.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Andreas replied casually.

  “Better come with us,” the sergeant repeated more firmly. “Otherwise we’d have to report in Filiates that you insisted on staying behind to help the guerrillas.”

  Andreas wasn’t willing to risk going to jail, so he shrugged, and with obvious reluctance, set out with the constables toward the west.

  The activity at the police station had spread to the whole village, electrified by the news that the guerrillas were practically in town. Some Liotes were delighted that they were returning, but many former ELAS supporters prepared to flee alongside the terrified rightists because they didn’t want to be conscripted.

  In the town square Spiro Michopoulos, the thin, pale bachelor who ran the cafenion, was surprised to see his rebellious nephew Andreas, who shared his own admiration for the andartes, leaving town in the company of the constables. Spiro went over to investigate and realized that Andreas was not leaving entirely by choice. “You should come along too, Spiro,” the sergeant told the shopowner. “The guerrillas are conscripting anything that moves.”

  Spiro grinned. “They’re not so hard up they’ll take me,” he said, joking about his near-fatal brush with tuberculosis, which had left him a semi-invalid. “Besides, I don’t dare leave the store. It’s full of goods, and they’ll clean it out if I’m not here to keep an eye on everything. They’ll be gone in a few days, anyway.”

  When Tassina Bartzokis came running into her house with the news of the approaching guerrillas, Eleni thought immediately of the weeping andartinas she had seen in Yannina. For herself, there was no choice; her husband had ordered her not to leave the house no matter what happened, but she wondered frantically if there was some way to save the children. She knew that Olga, now nineteen, and Kanta, who was fifteen, might be taken by force. Instinctively she headed down the mountain toward her father’s house. She was so used to turning to a man for advice in a crisis that now, in her fear, she had forgotten the last bitter exchange between them.

  When Eleni reached her parents’ house, she found Megali alone, crouched in a corner, starting at every sound. “He’s gone, Eleni,” she whimpered. “He left with Foto Gatzoyiannis and a crowd of other men for Filiates. He told me to stay here, that the andartes won’t hurt women, but I’m afraid!”

  She could hardly believe that her father had left without a goodbye, even though Christos had charged him with her family’s safety. Kitso had turned his back on her as emphatically as she had threatened to do to him. He had left her helpless and her children in danger.

  Eleni felt she was in a dark room; a room with many doors, and behind each door was a crack of light. Her father had shut one door on her, but, she thought quickly, there was still her brother-in-law Andreas. She hurried toward his house and found him outside the police station, loading a mule with boxes of files. “Take Olga and Kanta with you when you leave,” she begged him. “I’m afraid of what the andartes will do to them!” She paused. “I want you to take Nikola too,” she added. “It won’t be safe for him if they start fighting here. I’ll keep Glykeria and Fotini so they won’t think I’ve sent all my children away.”

  Andreas looked at her nervously, then went back to tying bags full of police files onto the mule’s back. “I’ll take all of you or nobody!” he said. “It’s no good having half the family down there in Filiates, worrying about you and the rest up here.”

  “But Christos told me not to leave the house!” Eleni cried. “If we all flee, they’ll burn it, but they wouldn’t hurt a woman and two little girls!”

  Andreas nodded, relieved at finding an excuse not to be burdened with the children. “You’re right. Keep all the children inside while they’re here and they won’t bother you. But if I don’t leave now, I’m a dead man.” He slapped the mule’s flank, and as Eleni watched her brother-in-law head off through the village square, the second door closed.

  She took a shortcut up the mountain and over toward the Perivoli. On the way she caught up with Tassos Bartzokis, who was just returning from a trip to Yannina. Learning that the guerrillas were almost on top of them, he was rushing home to pick up some changes of clothes and join the exodus of men for Filiates. Tassos, like Eleni, knew that young girls had been conscripted by force in other villages. He feared that his sister-in-law Rano was a likely victim as well as her friends, the two elder daughters of Eleni Gatzoyiannis. “Get Olga and Kanta ready,” Tassos said as soon as he saw her on the path. “I’m leaving right now and I’ll take Rano and your two girls too.”

  A door swung unexpectedly open and flooded Eleni with light. When the Germans came, Tassos had looked after her along with his own family. He had brought them sweets from Albania in the worst of the famine, and now he was offering her salvation once again. “That’s something my own father didn’t say to me,” she told him with emotion.

  “Go home and get them,” said Tassos urgently. “I’m going to the house to get Rano, and I’ll meet you there.”

  Eleni ran ahead, but the closer she got to the house, the more she remembered what Christos had written her: “You have no business going anywhere … stay in your home with your children …”

  She slowed down to a walk. What would Christos, not to mention all the villagers, say if they learned she had sent the eldest girls away with a man who was not a relative? Olga and Kanta shouldn’t even speak to Tassos, much less travel all night alone with him. By the time she reached the house, Eleni knew she couldn’t send them, no matter how good a friend Tassos was. She turned off to the Bartzokis house, where she found Tassos throwing things into a sack.

  “I’ll always be grateful that you offered to take the girls, Tassos,” she said, “but I’ve decided not to send them away. I’ll hide them around here somewhere until the guerrillas leave.”

  Hearing this, Rano decided she’d stay too. Olga Gatzoyiannis was her best friend; they could hide out together, she said. Besides, she didn’t want to leave her sister alone, because she was pregnant again. Tassos did not waste time arguing with their decision. He set off at once, almost running to catch up with the village men who had gone before. Eleni had closed the third door herself because of her fear of what people would say.

  Nearly two hours had passed since word first arrived that the guerrillas were coming, and in that time all but a handful of men, most too old to be conscripted, had left the village.

  Eleni went back to her own house and sat on the small veranda at the top of the steps. In the yard below, Nikola and Fotini played with pebbles, and Kanta and Glykeria squabbled over their chores. Olga sat in the shade, snapping the ends off string beans, humming as she worked. None of the children seemed worried about the approach of the guerrillas, but Eleni couldn’t shake off a sense of oppressive dread. Her mind searched for a way to get the children out before it was too late. Suddenly she thought of one last possibility: the tinker Antonis Paroussis, who lived in Babouri, was Christos’ first cousin. It was his wife, Antonova, wh
o had pleaded with Eleni to take in and hide the two ELAS andartes. Now they owed her a favor, and they were family. Eleni knew that both husband and wife were pro-ELAS but that Antonis, a frail, shy man, was not eager to be conscripted into the guerrilla army. He would probably be fleeing just as the men of Lia had done.

  “Quick, leave the beans and put some clothes in a sack!” Eleni shouted at Olga. “You’re going to take Kanta and Nikola to Babouri to your uncle Antoni Paroussis. Tell him I want you to go with him to Filiates until the guerrillas have passed through. Quick, girl! For once, don’t dawdle or you’ll be too late!”

  Eleni was in such a rush to get them under way to Babouri that it wasn’t until they were far down the road, their figures shrinking into punctuation marks among the ilex and scrub pine, that she felt a terrible panic of loss. Nikola left carrying his shoes in one hand, the other clutching Olga’s, turning now and then to look back at his mother.

  Eleni had hardly returned to the two younger girls when she heard Tassina Bartzokis pounding at the gate, shouting that the guerrillas were already in the Perivoli. They had come down the mountain from the north. She said that an advance party of three men were at Yiorgi Mitros’ mill, and the women of the neighborhood were going to meet them. “We’ve got to welcome them, to put a good face on things,” Tassina panted, one hand on her swollen belly. “It worked in Babouri when the Germans came. Maybe it will save us too.”

  Eleni picked up a jug of moonshine from the storeroom and a sack of shelled walnuts. She warned Glykeria to watch Fotini carefully and not to open the gate whatever happened. With Tassina she climbed the several hundred yards up past the washing pond, to where three bearded strangers in threadbare uniforms were sitting with their backs against the wall of the mill, smoking cigarettes while a crowd of neighborhood women looked on. Eleni offered them her walnuts and tsipouro, but one of the men refused, saying, “Now that we’re here, we’ll have plenty of time to eat, drink and learn about all of you. But first I need some answers.”

  He took out a pencil and a notebook. “Are there any constables in the village?”

  “No, we heard they’ve left,” said one of the women.

  “How many men in the village?” the guerrilla asked.

  “A few, we don’t know exactly,” said Tassina. “You know that men from Lia are always on the road working, so there are never very many here.”

  The guerrilla wrote on his pad for a while, then he looked up. “I want one of you to take this letter to Comrade Skevis, who’s camped with his men in the field behind the chapel.”

  All the women looked at Eleni, but no one said anything.

  The guerrilla followed their eyes. “You take it,” he said, holding the letter out to her.

  “But I’ve left small children at home alone!” she protested.

  “Olga’s there to watch them, isn’t she?” said Anastasia Yakou.

  Eleni hesitated. She couldn’t reveal that she’d sent Olga and Kanta to escape. She looked around at the faces of the women, all of them as familiar as her own. There was a coldness in their eyes that she’d never noticed before: none of them wanted to make the dangerous journey to find the andartes, and with one accord, they all had turned on her.

  “I’m afraid to go alone!” Eleni exclaimed. “At least let me have someone go with me.” She looked from one hard face to the next, then turned to the one in the group who seemed to show a glimmer of sympathy—her distant relative Tsavena Makou. “Go with me, zonia,” Eleni pleaded, using a village word meaning “kinswoman.” Tsavena nodded and came to stand next to her.

  The andarte with the letter told them that his battalion, led by Spiro Skevis, was camped up the mountain to the north “behind the little chapel on the other side.” Eleni assumed he meant behind the Chapel of St. Nicholas, but when she and Tsavena climbed up there, they found no sign of an army.

  Perhaps he meant another chapel. They walked on, eastward along the spine of the mountain range, searching desperately for the guerrillas, their leg muscles cramping and their breath coming fast in the thin air. Two hours after they set out, Eleni and Tsavena finally saw smoke from the fires of a large encampment at the base of the hill called Tserovetsi.

  When they reached the camp, where circles of shadowy figures crouched around campfires, Eleni stared in astonishment at the hundreds of men huddled together under ragged blankets shivering in the November frost. The last time she had seen the ELAS guerrillas in Lia they wore clean gray uniforms and carried new weapons taken from the Italians. Now they all were in rags, their beards matted, some barefoot, and others wearing shoes held together with twine. They sat like stones, watching the women with terrible eyes. None of them got up to greet her.

  There was a stir and Eleni heard hands clapping, as if summoning a waiter in a restaurant. She turned toward the sound and saw a gaunt, bearded, fair-haired man in a heavy coat. By his eyes she recognized Spiro Skevis, completely transformed from the days when he held court in the square with the other schoolteachers. Now he was even thinner, if possible, and the cold fire in his eyes was the only thing that animated his face. The men around her looked possessed, Eleni said later, like the swine into which Christ cast the devils.

  Spiro motioned her to come to him, and she handed over the note. “Welcome back to the Mourgana, Comrade Spiro,” she said, forcing her voice not to tremble. “Everyone in Lia is waiting for you.”

  He said nothing but unfolded the piece of paper she had given him. Slowly a smile spread over his face, not reaching his eyes. He stood up and shouted to the shivering guerrillas around him, “Come on, men, pack up! Saddle the animals! We’re moving out now!” He paused and cupped his hands to his mouth, then shouted even louder. “Tonight we’ll be in my village, and we’re going to squeeze water out of it!”

  With curses, laughter and groans, the men heaved themselves up off the frigid ground and began to saddle the few bony mules and horses. Eleni watched, not daring to ask Tsavena what Spiro could have meant.

  The guerrilla army followed the two women back to Lia, and when they reached the crest of the Prophet Elias, Spiro led the men down toward the village center while Eleni and Tsavena continued on to their homes in the Perivoli.

  Eleni entered her own gate, limping with exhaustion. She shouted through the door, and when it opened, her mouth fell open at the sight of Olga. Behind Olga, Nikola and Kanta were playing happily with the two other girls. All the way home Eleni had been consoling herself that they at least would escape the fate that she had glimpsed in Spiro Skevis’ eyes, and now here they were, closed in the trap with her.

  “What are you doing back?” she cried to Olga. “Didn’t you find Antoni?”

  Olga was tired and cross after all the fruitless walking. “We got to the Paroussis house, and he had already left,” she said. “Antonova said if we hurried we could catch him, but it was already getting dark, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find him. Antonova said the guerrillas wouldn’t harm us. They’re on our side, she said. So I came back.”

  Eleni was overcome with despair and weariness. “You should have gone on alone,” she murmured. But she had already gathered Nikola into her arms and she couldn’t let go of him.

  As she sat, watching the fire burn down, her cheek resting on the boy’s hair, Eleni began to feel sick with anger. Her father had left them all behind without a word, saving himself and leaving his wife, daughter and grandchildren unprotected. Andreas, her brother-in-law, didn’t want the responsibility of looking after her children. She had foolishly turned down Tasso Bartzokis’ offer of help because of her automatic concern for maintaining propriety. Her daughters would be compromised if they left the village with Tassos, but far worse things could happen to them here. And she herself had automatically discarded any thought of taking her whole family and fleeing because Christos had ordered her to stay and protect the house. He wrote her that the andartes were “Greeks, fellow villagers … fighting for their rights … Why should they bother my family?
” But he had never looked into their eyes as she had today. He had been gone for ten years and lived five thousand miles away, yet like an archbishop he issued edicts about what she should do. She had always shown him the obedience required of a wife, but she wondered, when it was a question of her children’s safety, if she shouldn’t have defied him and the edicts of village propriety which had always ruled her life.

  When it was very dark, Tassina and Rano came. There was another soft knock at the gate; Gregory Tsavos, the sixty-five-year-old field warden who lived in the house just above. He, too, wanted to hear what Eleni had learned from her encounter with the guerrillas.

  “I’ve just come from the Alonia,” Tsavos told the group of women, shaking his gray head, “and I saw evil omens everywhere. Just as the andartes came down the mountain, Andreas Michopoulos turned up, saying he gave the constables the slip outside of Povla. ‘Give me a uniform and a gun and I’ll show you where everything’s hidden,’ he was shouting. And he said he’d tell them all the spots to post guards, so that no one could sneak in or out of the village.”

  “We should leave now, before the guards are posted!” Tassina exclaimed.

  “How can you walk seven hours to Filiates at night in your condition?” retorted her sister, Rano.

  Eleni was staring at the embers of the fire. “It’s too late,” she said dully. “Spiro Skevis knows every corner of this village. We’re already in the lion’s mouth.”

  She had seen the last door close, and there would be no more chances. They were alone in the dark.

  When Spiro Skevis’ andartes entered Lia on the evening of November 27, 1947, they were one of six batallions invading the Mourgana mountains, part of a guerrilla army of 25,000 fighters spread through the mountains of western Macedonia and Epiros along the Yugoslav and Albanian borders.

  Although the Democratic Army of Greece contained many former ELAS fighters, it was now solely under the control of the Greek Communist Party, and unlike ELAS, it tolerated no divergence in its ranks from the hard party line.