Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  There was no way we could survive on his salary, so my three eldest sisters were sent to work in a Greek-owned factory that produced baked goods, where a knowledge of English wasn’t essential.

  My sister Fotini and I, eleven and ten years old, were sent to the local public school, which had no provisions for non-English-speaking students. On the first day we found ourselves in an ungraded class filled with children of every shape and size, who we quickly realized were all retarded. Soon I managed to learn enough English to be promoted to a regular grade. To my surprise, the teacher didn’t beat her students but draped a comforting arm around me when I struggled to recite aloud, a maternal gesture that touched a well of loneliness within me.

  Although Fotini had earned good marks in Greece, she never quite adjusted to school in America and dropped out as soon as she reached the legal leaving age of sixteen.

  My father turned his attention at once to the matter which had been my mother’s greatest concern: finding suitable husbands for her four daughters. Within ten years of our arrival in America, each girl was provided with a groom, beginning with the eldest and moving down.

  Although Olga had lost her cherished dowry, her American citizenship was dowry enough. Within months of our arrival, a letter came postmarked “Kastoria, Greece,” from a young tinker named Constantine Bartzokis whose family originally lived in Lia. So revered was the Gatzoyiannis name, the young man wrote, that he would deem it an honor if my father would consider him as a potential husband for any of his daughters. Christos replied that he would accept him as a groom for his eldest, and would put through papers for him to immigrate.

  Olga had given up her dream of marrying nothing less than a professional and she vaguely remembered the tall, dark-eyed Constantine visiting relatives in Lia when she was a girl. When the groom arrived, my father got him a place as salad chef in the restaurant where he worked, and we were even allowed to use one of the private dining rooms for the dinner and dance that followed the wedding ceremony.

  By 1954 my father had saved enough money to send Kanta back to Greece, ostensibly to sell the half of the store in Yannina which he still owned but also to use the proceeds to outfit herself for a wedding, after she found a suitable groom under the surveillance of my grandfather.

  From the moment she was met by Kitso at the boat in Athens, Kanta was deluged with a blizzard of invitations from the relatives of eligible young men, but not until she reached Lia and met a thin, mustached young man named Evangelos Stratis did she make up her mind. The couple’s formal engagement was sealed within days of their meeting, and after the wedding, Kanta returned to her job on the line at Table Talk Bakeries in Worcester until her husband was permitted to immigrate and found work with a Greek produce seller.

  One floor was no longer enough to house our growing family, so my father bought a three-story wooden tenement in Worcester for $13,000. Olga and Constantine and their new baby lived on the top floor, Kanta and her husband on the middle floor, and the rest of us on the ground floor.

  Glykeria was a veteran at Table Talk by the time our family went to a relative’s house in Worcester to welcome a new arrival from Babouri, twenty-eight-year-old Prokopi Economou, who had found a job in a shoe factory in Worcester. Glykeria was impressed by the innocence and openness of his round face. When, at a Greek picnic, Prokopi began singing old love songs and looking at her meaningfully, she knew he returned her admiration. Although Glykeria was not permitted to have dates, the two talked on the phone. Prokopi explained that he was not free to marry until his sister back in Greece had been satisfactorily wed. But Glykeria hadn’t lost her willfulness and she set the young man a deadline for him to declare his intentions or never speak to her again. Finally Prokopi defied his parents and married Glykeria in 1956.

  Fotini was the only one to select her husband entirely on her own. She went with our father to a name-day party of a relative in Phildelphia where she met a handsome young cabinet maker from Fatiri, Greece, named Minas Bottos. On her return, Fotini announced to her sisters that she was in love. They warned her against making such a decision on her own, at the age of nineteen, but Fotini was adamant. The only love match among the four girls was the only marriage that eventually ended in divorce.

  Eleni Gatzoyiannis had suffered the births of four daughters before finally bearing a son, but her daughters produced a total of eight boys and only two girls. Olga, who never quite conquered the English language or the complexities of American life, gave birth to three boys and one girl. Her children all began first grade speaking only Greek but graduated from top colleges to become either lawyers or doctors.

  Under the burden of family responsibilities, my father blossomed into a worthy patriarch, not only to his new family but to a growing community of refugees from Lia. One by one, he sponsored relatives who followed us to Worcester, until Christos Gatzoyiannis became the godfather of the large community of immigrants from Lia and Babouri who settled there.

  In his seventies and eighties, my father would sit with the dignity of a king on the chair of honor at the annual summer picnic of Liotes in Worcester. A serpentine line of dancers spiraled around him under the shade of the oak trees, and the hundreds of immigrants who owed their new lives to him paid homage. Although many women set their caps for the prominent widower, he never considered remarrying after my mother’s death and I never heard him speak of any other woman.

  If my father was the godfather of the immigrant community, I grew to be the consigliere after I entered college on a scholarship. As the only Greek with an education, I was in charge of doing all the immigration papers, citizenship applications, tax returns and medical forms for the burgeoning Greek populace. I helped to enroll their children in school and to interpret when necessary between my fellow villagers and the American doctors, teachers and judges.

  When I returned to Lia for the first time in 1963, I carried a wallet stuffed with gifts of cash from Worcester immigrants to their relatives back home. The Greeks seemed to absorb the Calvinist work ethic with their first step on American soil. They abandoned afternoon siestas and long, lazy hours in the coffee shops to work fourteen-hour days—husbands, wives and children side by side. They paid for their homes and automobiles in cash. Many of the Mourgana Greeks in Worcester, including all four of my brothers-in-law, saved enough eventually to open pizza parlors throughout New England.

  It was on that first trip back home in 1963 that I became close to my maternal grandfather. He had been such a distant figure in my youth but, as adults, we became friends after he shared with me, as a kind of peace offering, the secret of the Turk he killed when my mother was a child.

  In 1967 my grandmother, Megali, died at eighty-five. My grandparents had been married for seventy-one years, ever since they were both in their early teens. Although Kitso had fought with his wife every day, he couldn’t live without her. He fell ill and died a month later. As his life ebbed, he placed three long-hoarded gold sovereigns on a table near his bed and said he would give them to the first person who told him Nikola was coming up the mountain. But I was delayed by a crisis in my job as a reporter and he died before anyone could collect the reward.

  My grandfather had a long-standing rivalry with my uncle Foto as to which one would bury the other. My grandfather was eighty-seven when he died, and Foto was eighty-five then. Today Foto is a hundred years old, the Methuselah of the Mourgana. He still hunts and climbs the steep mountainside from his house to the cafenion in the village square every day, raising his first glass of tsipouro before noon. His mind and his ascerbic tongue are as sharp as ever as he spins tales of his long life: how he killed the Turk who insulted his first wife in 1909; uncovered the body of his second wife, Alexo, executed by the Communists; saw his son Costas throw his life away in a futile search for revenge on his mother’s killers.

  After Alexo’s execution, my uncle took a third wife, forty years his junior, who cares for his house, animals and garden, leaving him free to enjoy his longevity.
It bothers Foto not at all to drink at the same table as villagers who testified against Alexo at her trial.

  My father, Christos, remarkably like his brother in appearance but entirely different in character, seemed to share Foto’s vitality, but as he approached his nineties, his health began to fail. He can no longer drive his Oldsmobile around Worcester to pay calls on his vast circle of relatives and admirers. While Foto seems destined to live forever, my father is now frail, his mind wandering among the tragedies of the old years, unable to walk, his heart and lungs failing.

  My uncle often brags that he has lived so long by tossing the tragedies of his life behind him, but my father gradually became increasingly obsessed with the unfairness of my mother’s death. In that way, I resemble him.

  During the years I lived in Greece as a journalist, I was constantly drawn back to Lia. The village was slowly dying; only a few hundred old people were left behind as their children moved to the metropolitan centers in search of a better life. I began to undertake projects to revitalize the village: finding government money for a new water system, setting up a development company that would use donations from American Liotes to rebuild village landmarks, and raising the funds to construct a ten-room inn with a restaurant and a shop to sell the local crafts of tinworking and wood carving, which were in danger of dying out.

  At first I didn’t stop to think about why I was undertaking these projects until one day I was told a remark my uncle Andreas had made. Someone said to him, “It’s a wonderful thing that Nikola is doing for the people of the village,” and he replied with heavy sarcasm, “Well, of course, he owes it to them! After all, they killed his mother!”

  When I stopped to examine my motives, I realized that I was unconsciously trying to build a monument to my mother that would reflect the charitable acts she had done in the village—a monument that could not be torn down or defaced like a gravestone or shrine. These projects would be a visible daily reminder of her existence, but they would also be an enduring rebuke to those who had betrayed her, proof of their failure to destroy Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her children.

  My sisters did not share my interest in the village or my attachment to Greece. Like my uncle and aunt, they held the villagers responsible for my mother’s fate and they turned their backs on the land where they had suffered so much. They embraced all the luxuries, conveniences and opportunities of America, and obedient to my mother’s warnings, insisted they had no nostalgia for the old country.

  The question of avenging our mother’s death also divided my sisters and myself. They were certain that in time, God would punish the guilty. “Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small” is an article of faith rooted in the earliest Hellenistic thought. “Wicked men who congratulate themselves on escaping immediate trouble receive a longer and not a slower punishment,” Plutarch affirmed in his essay on “the tardiness of God’s punishments.”

  From childhood I could not share my sisters’ complacent belief that revenge was best left to God, although I understood why they embraced it. They had spent more years than I had in the cauldron of wartime Greece where tragedy rained on every head, and what they had seen had made them fatalists.

  In the decade of war from 1939 to 1949, one out of every ten Greeks was killed—450,000 during World War II and 150,000 during the civil war. Of the survivors, nearly 100,000 had been exiled behind the Iron Curtain, some by choice, many by force. Families were rent apart, not to be reunited for many years, often forever. The children taken in the pedomasoma from the Mourgana villages were sent to Rumania, while their parents found themselves in Hungary or Poland; the girls conscripted as andartinas wound up in Russia or Czechoslovakia. No wonder simple village women like my sisters considered themselves helpless pawns of destiny.

  Greek women through the centuries have had little choice but to accept tragedy with resignation and try to survive. Only men were expected to grapple with the Fates, no matter how unequal the contest. It was also a man’s responsibility to seek revenge for the sufferings of weaker members of his family.

  Although I was only a nine-year-old boy when I arrived in the United States, I knew even then that the day would come when I had to take some sort of vengeance against my mother’s killers. It was the only balm for what Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, speaking of the long-ago murder of her daughter, called “that pain which never sleeps.”

  During my years of growing up in America, my sisters bolstered their argument that God would punish the guilty by citing the fate of those who had contributed to our mother’s death. As news filtered back to us from Greece, it seemed at first that divine retribution was working with merciless efficiency.

  Prokopi and Spiro Skevis, the two brothers who sowed the seeds of Communism in Lia, both died before the war was over. Prokopi, the intellectual one, famed as an orator, was killed by a stray bullet in the mouth during his first battle after he came out of Yugoslavia in the summer of 1949. His brother, the fiery major who led a battalion in the Mourgana, was promoted to colonel, a reward for the skill with which he led his men on the retreat to the Zagoria mountains. In the last days of the civil war, shortly after he learned of his brother’s death, Spiro stepped on a land mine which had been set by his own men. The shrapnel tore away part of one leg and he bled to death over the next two days.

  Spiro Skevis’ success in bringing Communism to the Mourgana villages had turned to ashes in his mouth. The execution in Lia of his five fellow villagers tormented him. A captain in his battalion later told me how, shortly after the retreat from the Mourgana, Spiro went out of control and tried to kill one of the chief aides of Kostas Koliyiannis, drawing a gun on him and screaming that the man was a criminal, a murderer of women. Other guerrillas jumped Spiro before he could pull the trigger. He went to the grave tormented by the perversion of the movement that he and Prokopi had begun with such high intentions. After his death he was promoted by the Communists to brigadier general.

  The tentacles of the village grapevine, reaching all the way to Worcester, also brought news that two of the women from Lia who betrayed our mother had suffered tragic setbacks.

  The blond village beauty, Stavroula Yakou, feared as a collaborator of the guerrillas, had given evidence against my mother and tyrannized Glykeria after the executions. When Stavroula was taken by force to be an andartina, Glykeria had the satisfaction of seeing her reduced to groveling hysteria by shell shock in the last months of the war. Stavroula’s sufferings multiplied after she returned from exile in Tashkent to Lia in the late 1950s. A wasting cancer eroded her beauty and killed her slowly.

  Her words on her deathbed seemed proof of Plutarch’s contention that “there is no need for either God or man to punish evildoers but that their lives are sufficient, all distraught and ruined as they are by their own villainy.” During her last hours, Stavroula’s mind was obsessed with Eleni Gatzoyiannis. From her deathbed she said to Olga Venetis, our neighbor who had been one of my mother’s closest friends, “Tell the Gatzoyiannis girls that I wasn’t the reason their mother died. What I said was nothing compared to what others said against her. How could I speak against her? We survived on the bread she gave us.” The worm of guilt had been gnawing at Stavroula all those years.

  On the last day of my mother’s life, she had referred wistfully to Constantina Drouboyiannis. “She’s lucky,” my mother said to Glykeria. “She managed to save her daughters and herself.” What she didn’t say, but everyone knew, was that by testifying against her, Constantina had destroyed my mother’s defense that she didn’t know about the escape plan. Constantina Drouboyiannis succeeded in having herself exonerated but ultimately she was not the lucky woman my mother had supposed.

  After Constantina returned from exile in Hungary and rejoined her husband and children in Crete, she saw her son die, another victim of cancer. A woman who was related to both Constantina’s family and our own later told us that after the boy’s death, one of Constantina’s daughters turned on her mo
ther and exclaimed, “You’ve always said that you were blameless in Eleni Gatzoyiannis’ fate. Now you see the harvest of what you did!” Like most Greeks, the girl shared Euripides’ conviction that “The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.”

  Through the decades after the war, I followed the fate of the Greek Communist leaders with dogged interest. From books and articles, some written by the guerrillas themselves, I learned that the leading Communist officers of the war years also seemed pursued by an avenging Nemesis.

  After the last mountain stronghold of the DAG fell in August of 1949, Communist Party leader Nikos Zachariadis led his men into exile behind the Iron Curtain and announced on October 16 that he was ending hostilities “to prevent the total destruction of Greece.”

  Zachariadis at first managed to retain control of the party despite his disastrous leadership of the insurrection. With the efficiency of a Stalin, he quickly eliminated those who tried to topple him and even caged one of his most vocal critics, a former physician and guerrilla general, in a specially built cell in the basement of Zachariadis’ own dwelling until the prisoner died.

  But Zachariadis was a staunch Stalinist, and following the denunciation of the Soviet dictator by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, the party leadership was wrested from him. Battles broke out between supporters and opponents of Zachariadis in Greek exile communities throughout Eastern Europe. In Tashkent, a skirmish among the Greek Communist exiles involving clubs and knives was so vicious that Russian police had to be called in to break it up, and more than a hundred Greeks were hospitalized. In the end, Zachariadis was toppled. He ended his days in 1973 as a clerk in the Department of Waters and Forests for a village lost in the Urals.