The people of Lia were no different. “Take the wind as it comes,” they said. If the DAG demanded children for the pedomasoma, mothers rationalized, they would give up one or two so that the rest could survive.
But as much as Eleni tried to appease the guerrillas, she could not compromise when it came to her children. Keeping her family alive and together was the purpose that had filled her life for twenty years. Now she knew that they were going to take the two youngest away from her; eventually the two eldest girls would certainly be conscripted into the besieged rebel army. Submitting to the will of the guerrillas had accomplished nothing. In order to save her children, she had to defy them.
Eleni decided to gamble all their lives on the chance that she could get the family out of the occupied zone before the guerrillas separated them. She began to plan something that no one else in the half-dozen Mourgana villages ever dared: a mass escape.
She spoke to Nikola quietly, repeating words that sounded hollow to her ears but seemed to soothe him: they would never be separated, she would never allow anyone to take him. He lifted his eyes and she saw faith in her ability to protect him.
Eleni knew she couldn’t lead her family out of the village without being seen by the guerrilla lookouts, stumbling into a minefield, unless she had help. She needed to bring into her plot a man who could learn the movement of the guerrilla patrols without raising their suspicions; someone who was familiar with the paths through the foothills connecting Lia and the Great Ridge; someone who had an idea of the placement of the minefields. But it had to be a man Eleni could trust not to betray her to the security police’s informers.
There were few men left in the village, and those who remained were either very loyal to the guerrillas or old and frail. Spiro Michopoulos would have been ideal to lead the escape, Eleni reflected, if only she could be sure his visit to her had been a warning to flee. But she had no way of knowing if that was what he meant or if he had been sent to trick her.
After much thought Eleni reluctantly came to the conclusion that the only man left in the village who had the qualifications she needed was the tinker Lukas Ziaras. Lukas was considered a ne’er-do-well who tried to make up for his small stature and meager earnings with coffeehouse bravado. But he was married to one of Eleni’s first cousins, Soula Haidis, who had grown up under the same roof and was like a younger sister to her. That made Lukas a relative. Despite his garrulity, she felt sure he would not betray her plans to the security police.
Eleni knew that Lukas’ low standing in the village had always rankled him. She suspected that the idea of leading the escape might appeal to his ego, for if they succeeded, the exploit would make him famous throughout the Mourgana. She knew, too, that despite his weaknesses Lukas was devoted to his five children and wouldn’t want to lose them to the pedomasoma. He spent hours whittling wooden toys for the little ones, returning home every night to make the sign of the cross over each of his sleeping children with a paternal solicitude, rare in a Greek village.
Lukas had one outstanding qualification to recommend him as a leader of their escape: he and his family lived in one of the southernmost houses in the village, just next to the ruins of the Church of the Virgin, where the guerrilla lookouts were posted, and the night raiding parties dispatched. Because of the location of his property, he would know the paths leading from his fields down the mountain and through the foothills and would have seen where the mines were planted. And without exciting suspicion, he could stroll over to the church at twilight to smoke a cigarette and engage the guerrillas in conversation, learning where they were sending the raiding parties that night.
These patrols were made up of the most fanatically loyal young guerrillas and andartinas: those willing to risk their lives on the four-hour walk across the foothills after dark to harass the soldiers on the slopes of the Great Ridge. Eleni had seen one of the young raiders, a boy nicknamed “Mermingas” (“the ant”) at the house of Angeliki Botsaris, where he brought his lice-infested uniforms to be boiled. Mermingas strutted before the women with a bazooka on his back and bragged, “With this I’m going to blow away every fascist on the Ridge.” Eleni knew the night raiders would pose the greatest danger to her family’s surviving the escape, and only Lukas was in a position to see which routes they took.
As for Lukas’ wife, Eleni had no reservations about trusting her. Soula Haidis Ziaras was a good-natured, uncomplaining woman totally dedicated to the welfare of her children. When a bearded guerrilla came to her house and demanded three of the youngest for the pedomasoma, the normally gentle Soula shouted, “I’ll see them eating dirt from my garden before I give them to you!” The andarte hit her so hard that one eye filled up with blood and was swollen for weeks afterward. Eleni knew that Soula would be as eager as she was to escape when she learned what the guerrillas intended to do with their children.
Before her resolve could waver, Eleni set out toward the Ziaras house, praying that Lukas would agree to lead them. Even if his thirst for glory and his love for his children didn’t sway him, she suspected that he would agree to do it for the amount of money she planned to offer him.
Eleni found Lukas listlessly mending a pot in his yard, wearing the white towel around his neck that had become his trademark, to the amusement of the rest of the village. Lukas was terrified of being conscripted by the guerrillas or sent on daily work details, so he had developed a clever ruse to convince them he was an invalid. Nearly everyone suspected he was malingering, but only his family knew how he did it so convincingly. He packed a roll of pounded nettles around his neck to make it red and swollen. Then he painted the inside of his throat with a solution of diluted hydrochloric acid, which every tinker used to scour pots. This gave Lukas his chronic cough and hoarse, wheezing voice, widely mimicked by village wags. He went everywhere with a towel soaked in camomile tea wrapped around his neck—the sign of an invalid. The trick succeeded in convincing the guerrillas that he was unfit to work, but twenty-five years later, Lukas would die of cancer of the throat.
The tinker was surprised to see Eleni and jumped up to greet her. Lukas always reminded her of a bantam rooster with his strutting walk, small squinty eyes and long nose reaching toward a sharp chin. When Eleni told him that she wanted to speak to him and his wife in private, suspicion, fear and curiosity mingled on his face.
In the kitchen, Soula and her daughter Marianthe were preparing boiled greens while the youngest Ziaras child, Alexi, two, slept in the wooden cradle. Lukas ordered Marianthe to leave them alone and she shot him a black look. Marianthe, who had been conscripted as an andartina along with Kanta and released with her, was a cunning girl. Guessing from Eleni’s face that something important was in the wind, she positioned herself under the kitchen window to eavesdrop on the adults inside.
“I’m going to open my heart to you, because we are blood,” Eleni said in a low voice. “But however you feel about what I’m going to say, you must kiss the cross and never repeat it, because it could mean death to me and my children.”
Soula glanced at her husband, then took off her apron and sat down near the cradle. The couple listened in silence as Eleni repeated the conversation that Nikola had overheard, Lukas occasionally interrupting with soft puffs of astonishment: “Po! po! po!”
“They’re going to take our children at gunpoint, whether we volunteer them or not,” Eleni concluded. She looked around and lowered her voice. “I’ve decided to take my family out, but I can’t do it alone. I need a man to lead us, someone clever who knows the guerrillas’ movements and the paths through the minefields.” She turned to Lukas, who was nervously shifting the towel around his neck. “That’s why I’ve come to you.”
“We’ve been talking about the same thing, Eleni,” whispered Soula, as if it was a relief to speak the words aloud, but Lukas gave her a withering look that stopped her in mid-sentence. The little man paced silently up and down, making a great show of thinking and rolling a cigarette. It was true that his wife had be
en begging him to lead them out ever since the guerrillas came for their children and blackened her eye. But Lukas had vacillated, knowing he would have a hard time crossing to the other side even if they did survive all the way to the Great Ridge. Because he had stayed behind in the village, the government troops might think he was a Communist plant, a spy. But if the Amerikana and her family came with him, he wouldn’t be suspected of treachery—her father’s royalist sympathies and her American husband were well known.
Eleni watched Lukas pacing and thinking, then she added, “If you succeed in getting all of us out, together and alive, as soon as we get to Filiates I’ll telegraph Christos to send you one thousand dollars.”
The tinker’s small eyes widened at the sum. He stopped pacing and extended his hand to Eleni. “Our children are the only thing that count,” he wheezed.
Soula rocked miserably back and forth in her chair “And if we’re leading them right to their deaths?” she cried. At the sight of the grim resolve on the face of her older cousin, Soula bowed her head. “If what Nikola heard is true, then I suppose we have no other choice,” she said. “May the Holy Virgin protect us!”
Lukas was already carried away with enthusiasm, dragging on his cigarette as he worked out a plan. It occurred to him that God’s hand was in the arrival of Eleni Gatzoyiannis at his door. Lukas had always felt life didn’t deal him a full deck. He was a second son, cheated of his father’s attention and the patriarchal house in the center of the village. He felt that if his parents were better off, like Minas Stratis’ family, or had tried harder on his behalf, as Spiro Skevis’ father did, then he, too, could have been an educated man, a leader. Mending pots was a waste of his talents; he was meant to be a schoolteacher or a military officer, of that he was convinced. Now destiny had handed him the opportunity to prove his cleverness by defying the whole guerrilla army and making Spiro Skevis and his fellow officers look like fools. He would lead a mass exodus of women and children to safety right under the noses of their persecutors, like Moses leading the chosen people out of the wilderness.
In his excitement, Lukas unwrapped his towel from around his neck and began issuing orders like a general. Some preparations would have to be made, he said; he would take care of everything. They had to select a night when the moon was waning and the weather, winds and omens were right. In the meantime the main thing was for the two families to carry on their daily routine without doing anything to arouse suspicion. Eleni must not be seen visiting his house again. She was to work in her bean field every morning, and Soula would come to her there on the day he chose. Then, on the chosen night, as soon as darkness fell, Eleni must send her family in pairs, by different routes, down to the now abandoned Haidis mill in the ravine, where they would all gather in the cellar. When they were assembled, they would slip down the ravine, walking from the spot where it dispersed in the foothills straight across to the Great Ridge.
Lukas was talking excitedly, interrupted only by the coughing fits which got worse when he was agitated. Eleni watched and listened to him with growing trepidation. Finally she said in a stern voice, “Remember, Lukas, this is just between our two families. You mustn’t tell anyone else—your brother, your parents, your sister-in-law. Just a careless word could destroy us.”
Lukas gave her a look of reproof. He was a man, wasn’t he, and the leader of this mission? Who understood the risks better than he did?
As she returned home from the Ziaras house, Eleni tried to calm the misgivings that were growing in her. She called the family together and told them what she was planning. She had no fears about Nikola and Fotini betraying the plot; Greek village children understood from an early age that life pitted the family against the rest of the world and they protected family secrets as zealously as their parents did.
No one objected to Eleni’s announcement, least of all Nikola. If the idea of trying to slip out of the village at night under the guns of the guerrillas frightened him, it was less terrifying than being abducted into Albania and separated forever from his mother and sisters. Even his grandmother Megali agreed that they had no other choice, although she began to weep at the thought of leaving her house. Nitsa moaned about the trauma of the escape bringing on a miscarriage, but she quickly rejected Eleni’s suggestion that she stay behind. Olga said nothing. Secretly she mourned the loss of her chances to become the wealthiest and most envied bride in Lia. Kanta had always longed to escape the lusterless life of the village, but her mother’s announcement brought back all the terrors of her weeks with the guerrillas. Now the men who had trained her to kill would be hunting her family.
During the days that followed, the pressure of waiting made everyone irritable. It seemed pointless to plant and tend crops they would never harvest. Eleni went every morning to the bean field but there was no sign of Soula Ziaras. As she worked, she rehearsed the escape over and over in her mind, trying to anticipate the dangers. She knew that Nitsa and Megali would be so frightened that they’d create more of a risk than the children. She wished there was someone calm and reliable to share the burden with her. Inevitably, Eleni thought of her sister-in-law Alexo. Ever since Alexo’s husband, Foto, had fled to Filiates ahead of the guerrillas, she had been living in her house alone, except for her eleven-year-old daughter Niki. Two of Alexo’s married daughters, Athena and Arete, lived elsewhere in the village, and the other six grown children were living in areas of Greece not occupied by guerrillas.
Eleni made up her mind to invite Alexo along on the escape. Despite what she had said to Lukas, she knew that her sister-in-law could be trusted not to betray them and her presence in the group could help keep everyone calm. At the end of the long walk to her house, when Eleni saw Alexo’s smile of welcome and felt her strong arms embracing her, she knew she had made the right decision. But Alexo listened to her and then shook her head. “I can’t leave Athena alone here in the village, eight months pregnant,” she said, “and she could never survive the walk in her condition.”
Alexo lapsed into a depressed silence for a moment, then turned and seized both Eleni’s hands in hers. “Take Arete with you instead of me!” she whispered, naming her eldest daughter, who was barren. “They’re sure to conscript her as an andartina if she doesn’t get out, and if they do that, her husband will never take her back. Ever since he learned she can’t have children, he’s been looking for an excuse to divorce her, and if she was drafted, that’s all he’d need. I’ll stay to help Athena through her delivery—they won’t hurt an old woman like me—but you must save Arete!”
Arete was the daughter Alexo loved best. Eleni hesitated. Ever since Arete had been sent to Yannina for the operation that removed her womb, she had been excitable and nervous, and she was not the smartest of Alexo’s children, but, Eleni reflected, she was young and strong and could help Megali or one of the children on the walk. Besides, she couldn’t refuse Alexo a favor after the woman had helped her through so many crises, becoming dearer to her than any sister. Eleni nodded and told her to warn Arete; they would send word somehow on the day of the escape. “But what if the guerrillas punish you for her leaving?” Eleni worried.
“How can they blame me for what my married daughter does?” scoffed Alexo. “Ach, Eleni, I wish I could go with you!”
“You’ll come soon,” Eleni reassured her. “When this is over, we’ll meet in Filiates and take the bus to Igoumenitsa, where we can sit all afternoon at a restaurant by the pier, eating fish and watching the dolphins play in the harbor.”
“From your lips to the ears of God!” exclaimed Alexo.
The two friends sat and whispered together all morning, making plans for after the war, but they both knew they were lying. Once Eleni set out from the village, whether the escape succeeded or failed, their lives were unlikely to cross again. Both women struggled to hide their tears as they embraced for what was probably the last time.
For several days it rained and the sound of the water dripping off the eaves eroded Eleni’s patience. On t
he first sunny day, Eleni, Olga and Nitsa carried three giant copper washing kettles of clothing down to the Haidis bean field below the house near a small ditch which collected water from the nearby spring for irrigating the crops. Under the clothes, Eleni had hidden some of the family’s valuables—pieces of Olga’s dowry, some of Christos’ best suits, the golden pitcher and the iridescent taffeta pillow from Constantinople.
Eleni removed the old clothes she had piled on top of the kettles and carried them to the irrigation ditch. Olga and Nitsa took a hoe and shovel and went into the bean rows nearby, pretending to turn over the soil but really digging holes big enough to conceal the kettles, while Eleni went through the motions of doing the laundry. When all was ready, the three women lifted the kettles into the cavities, put waterproof tarpaulins on top and quickly buried them, replanting the beans on top of the spot. As Eleni patted the earth firm, she wondered when she would look on her treasures again.
In the distant neighborhood of the Church of the Virgin, Soula Ziaras was also busy. She cut up a blanket to make a pouch that would hold the baby on her back, leaving her hands free. She made holes for the child’s legs and put a piece of board covered with padding inside for support. One evening at twilight she risked the ten-minute walk to the Haidis mill. There Soula hid some clothes in a nettle patch below the mill so the fugitives could collect them on their way down the mountain.
About a week after her original visit to the Ziaras house, Eleni was working in the bean field when she saw Soula coming up the path. Eleni’s mouth grew dry.
From a distance Soula called, “Did you cut all the beans, cousin? Are there any left? I haven’t a thing to feed the children.”
“There’s plenty here!” Eleni shouted back. “Come pick a potful.” As the women bent together over a row of beans, Soula whispered, “It’s tonight, as soon as it gets dark! Be sure no one sees you going down to the mill.”
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