Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  I persisted in my questions and Milia began to speak disjointedly, skipping from one subject to another, from the present to the past: “My mother talked about leaving with my younger sisters. I remember being up in the mountains as an andartina. They came and took me down to see my mother, who was in the jail, and she started to cry. I tried to look, but they turned my head away. More I don’t remember. They asked me questions. They said my mother and sisters wanted to escape. I said I told them not to go, and they didn’t. I told them that other people suggested to my mother to go; it wasn’t her idea, but I talked her out of it. I was afraid.” She paused, at a loss for words, then asked me imploringly, “What would you have done?”

  Her disjointed monologue began again, a litany of the sufferings of her life. I began to feel suffocated by the small airless room and her self-pitying recital. I stood up to leave but she grabbed my arm. She hadn’t wanted to let me in, but now she didn’t want me to go. “Stay a little,” she pleaded, her eyes wet. She began to repeat the same details and I headed resolutely for the door, but she held me back. I sensed that there was something she wanted to communicate but didn’t know how.

  She touched the sleeve of the leather coat I was wearing, admiring it like a child, asking where I got it and how much it cost. She asked how I had arrived at her door and if I owned an automobile. I told her I had come in a rented car but owned one in Greece and one in America. She stared wide-eyed, imagining the cars, the clothes. Then she fixed me with an expression that I couldn’t decipher. It might have been envy or regret or even relief. She took her hand from my sleeve and said with a sigh, “The years have been good to you.”

  As I drove back from Znojmo to Vienna, I was so physically and emotionally drained that I felt ill. I couldn’t shake off Milia’s desperate question: What would I have done in her place? I reassured myself that I would not have acted as she did, but I knew that she had been a young girl, frightened and convinced that to save her mother she had to lie and betray my mother. I no longer could muster the desire to see Milia punished any more than life had already made her suffer.

  My sisters had always believed that our fellow villagers caused my mother’s death, but my encounters in Eastern Europe and my interviews in Greece had convinced me that the villagers were not the instigators of her suffering. The guerrillas had selected civilians who would betray their neighbors out of fear, moral weakness, envy or a desire for influence, but it was the villagers who were the puppets and the guerrillas who pulled the strings.

  Before my search was complete, there was one more visit I had to make. In my pocket was the name and address of Zeltas, the head of the security police in Lia. None of the scores of people I talked to described any instance when Zeltas interrogated or tortured my mother, but I wanted to see him face to face to satisfy myself that he had not been one of her tormentors. I also wanted to learn more about the role of his guerrilla superiors and to verify from someone on the inside what I had already learned about Katis’ culpability in her death. The investigative reporter’s primary tenet is to confirm every piece of information with several independent sources. I had always been scrupulous about cross-checking, and this time I wanted to be irrefutably sure of my facts.

  In Vienna I boarded an Austrian Airlines plane that flew directly to Salonika. It was raining when I reached the street, lined with concrete slabs of apartment buildings, where Zeltas lived under his real name of Christos Nanopoulos. The main entrance was open. According to the cards posted beside the bells, Zeltas lived in the basement flat, so I walked down the stairs and knocked at his door. There was no answer, but when I turned away I heard a sound and looked back to see a pair of faded gray eyes peering out.

  I introduced myself, asking for Nanopoulos, and he reluctantly opened the door wider, revealing a dark narrow hallway that ended in a room barely large enough to hold two single beds with a wooden table wedged between them.

  Zeltas was taller than I, and despite his seventy years he had the muscular body of a man who had spent the last three decades working on a construction site in Russia. He studied me suspiciously before relenting, leading me toward the single room.

  We sat facing each other on the two beds with the table between us. There was also a wood-burning stove in the room with a metal poker beside it. Zeltas studied me with the cold eyes of the military police officer he had once been. As we talked, I couldn’t help remembering how the former guerrilla, Taki, described my mother being tortured by one of the police outside the prison, her body twisted backward, his knee threatening to snap her spine. At the memory, the same pulsing anger began to rise in me. If Zeltas let slip any clue that he had been the one who tortured her, I knew I couldn’t stop myself from attacking him, making him feel as much pain as she had. I glanced toward the poker beside the stove, mentally measuring how far I would have to reach to seize it and use it on him. It seemed fortunate that there was no one around to stop me.

  Perhaps Zeltas glimpsed my intentions in my eyes; he began to fidget uneasily. But when I identified myself and asked about his responsibilities as head of the security police in Lia, his answers had the ring of truth. I had learned, in interviewing guerrillas and villagers alike, that those most culpable in my mother’s fate always were the most voluble in affirming their innocence, insisting that they not only didn’t betray my mother but had done everything possible to help her. But Zeltas listened to my questions passively, searched his memory and said only that he didn’t remember my mother specifically, but he did remember that there was one woman detained for a time in the jail whose husband was in America. “I remember her because my own father spent many years in Bristol, Connecticut,” he said. “I remember telling that to this woman, but I don’t remember what happened to her.”

  He added, “You have to understand that while one of my responsibilities was the security militia in Lia, I was also a captain in a battalion based there. I spent most of the time away from the village on missions. I went out and inspected the guard posts. I spent very little time at the jail.”

  His memory of the prisoner Andreas Michopoulos was much more vivid. Zeltas said that he roused the whole village to search for the two missing prisoners because their escape would be blamed on him. He said that the boy was tied to a board and beaten, “but not on my orders. It was others in the judicial branch who had the power to order interrogations.”

  I pressed him for the names of those in charge of the beatings and executions in Lia and he replied, “Headquarters controlled everything. Nobody could be arrested, beaten or executed without authorization from the political commissar, Koliyiannis. Beatings might be done with the authorization of Koliyiannis’ agents, but not a single execution was carried out unless he authorized it personally. Reports and accusations would go to Koliyiannis and he would decide to execute or not. Before the trial came Koliyiannis’ judgment. Then the trial was held to give a legal appearance to the process. For me this didn’t seem right. We harmed our own cause.”

  I leaned forward, watching his eyes. “You say that Koliyiannis based his decisions to kill or set free on the basis of intelligence reports prepared for him by his agents in Lia. Exactly who were those agents?”

  Zeltas replied without hesitation, “There were several; but the head man in Lia—the investigating magistrate—was a man we called Katis.”

  I had the final confirmation I needed.

  I flew from Salonika to my home in Athens on December 6, the feast day of St. Nicholas, knowing that I had exhausted every avenue and that my investigation was over. Now I had to decide what to do about Katis.

  It was clear beyond doubt that Katis was the primary living instigator of my mother’s death. It was Kostas Koliyiannis, at the pinnacle of Communist guerrilla leadership in Epiros, who had made the policy, deciding to prosecute and execute civilians in each village to terrify the populace into submission. But it was Katis and the men at his level—the intelligence gatherers and investigating magistrates—who decided which i
ndividuals in each village were to be singled out for this purpose and sacrificed to the commissar’s political ends.

  Because December 6 was my name day, the telephone rang incessantly with relatives and friends calling to wish me the traditional “many years,” but my replies were perfunctory. While my wife and children were busy with Christmas preparations, I could think of nothing but my mother and the judge Katis. I had assembled all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that had occupied me for so many years, but I still had to put them together in a meaningful pattern to answer the question that was tormenting me: what to do about Katis? I knew that whatever I did when I confronted him, I had to be free to act without worrying that my family would suffer repercussions for it. I decided it was time to move them back to the United States. I didn’t tell them the real reason for the move, only that my work in Greece had come to an end.

  When the moving van came to collect our household belongings, the Walther PPK pistol was not among them. I left it in the safekeeping of a friend in Athens who I knew could be trusted. We flew back to the States on New Year’s Day of 1982 to settle in a house we owned in Massachusetts.

  Soon, I knew, I had to go back to Greece to deal with Katis, but first I buried myself in the writing of the final chapters of my mother’s story—her trial, torture and execution. I was hoping as I put these events on paper that it would become clear what I must do next. It was a lonely and painful few months in the worst of the New England winter, while I relived the agonies of her last days.

  By the time I had finished, I knew I had accomplished one of my goals: I had come to know my mother truly, in full dimension, not from the limited perspective of childhood memories.

  Until the war threatened the one thing that she held most dear—her children—she was an ordinary peasant woman, subject to all the doubts, fears and prejudices planted by her upbringing and her primitive world. But when she was caught in a vise and saw her family faced with destruction, she discovered the clarity of vision to know what she must do and the strength to do it.

  That was her kairos, her decisive moment, and I knew my own was approaching. As my jigsaw puzzle began to take shape, it seemed that Katis had been left behind specifically to test me. All the others responsible for my mother’s death were now either dead and beyond my reach or, as I learned in tracking down the villagers who betrayed her, not prime actors in her fate but weak individuals who had been manipulated by the guerrillas, not deserving of punishment, only contempt.

  But Katis stood apart like a beacon, drawing me toward him. He had been convincingly proved the most responsible individual for her suffering still left alive. As far as I knew, he had not suffered, nor was he likely to suffer for his crimes unless I took some action against him. I had to test myself by returning to Greece and facing him.

  Circumstances forced me to make that trip before I was ready. In March I received a midnight telephone call telling me that my aunt Nitsa had suddenly died in Lia, after gloomily predicting her own death for so many years that we had all stopped listening. I took the first plane I could for Athens, but she was buried within hours of her death and I arrived too late for the funeral.

  Although I had always harbored a deep resentment against Nitsa—I knew she could have saved my mother by going in her place to the threshing fields—for years she was the only remaining link I had with my mother’s family and our life in the village. It was painful to return to Lia and find my grandfather’s house empty of her comical, outspoken presence.

  During the years I lived in Athens I had visited Nitsa nearly every month and she came to think of me as the son she never had. Now there was only my eighty-three-year-old uncle Andreas, bereft and lost after fifty-nine years of marriage. I stayed with him for the nine days until my aunt’s memorial service, trying to comfort him as he comforted me on the day I learned my mother was dead. On the tenth day I drove down the mountain to Yannina to pick up a headstone I had ordered for Nitsa’s grave.

  When the stonecutter proudly unveiled the cross of gray marble, I stared at it in astonishment. Although it bore the correct date of Nita’s death, instead of her birth date, he had engraved the birth date of my mother: 1907. He insisted he had carried out my instructions exactly.

  Shaken by my mistake, I left the stonecutter’s shop in the center of Yannina and began to walk aimlessly. I came to a stop outside 46 Napoleon Zervas Street, Katis’ apartment building. There was a scrap of paper taped over the spot where his name had been. I went closer and read: “Kotrotsis, Ioannis.”

  A band of fear tightened around my chest at the thought that Katis had escaped me while I was delaying our confrontation. Panicky, I didn’t wait for the elevator but bolted up the four flights to his door and leaned on the bell. When no one answered, I frantically rang the bells on either side. Breathing hard, I raced back down the stairs and accosted a young woman in the lobby who was talking to a delivery man. “What happened to the Lykas who lived on the fourth floor?” I panted.

  She looked at me curiously, then decided I was harmless; just an eccentric foreigner.

  “He’s moved back to Konitsa, where he came from,” she replied. “He’s built a retirement home there.”

  Luckily, I had an acquaintance living in Konitsa. I telephoned him to ask if he knew Achilleas Lykas. Like most towns in northern Greece, Konitsa is small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business. My friend informed me that Lykas and his wife were indeed living there in a new house, along with their daughter and her husband, a career army officer stationed in Konitsa. “But if you want to find Lykas,” he added, “he’s not here now. He’s just gone to Athens on business.”

  Having Katis in Athens, away from his family, suited my purposes well. I needed to find where he was staying, so I called a relative who, like Katis’ son-in-law, was an officer in northern Greece. I prevailed on my relative to call the young man and tell him that an American friend, writing a book about the civil war, was in Athens and wanted to interview his father-in-law. I told him to mention the names of other prominent guerrillas I had interviewed to calm any suspicions Katis might have and to say that I would be at the Caravel Hotel. Soon my relative phoned back. The son-in-law didn’t know where Katis was staying, but he promised that when his father-in-law called home, he would pass on my message.

  Back in Athens I took a room at the Caravel and recovered the pistol I had left behind. Then there was nothing to do but sit in the room and wait for Katis’ call.

  From time to time I checked and cleaned the pistol, testing the spring in the cartridge to make sure it was working smoothly. I tried not to leave the room except during the hours of two-thirty and five-thirty in the afternoon—the siesta—when Greeks don’t make telephone calls or pay social visits. There was no way I could sleep, so I got in my rented car at two-thirty every day and began to drive. I headed north toward the gently rising slopes of Mount Hymettos, a green, wooded retreat not far from the door of my hotel.

  On the first afternoon of my vigil, I drove up the road that winds around the mountain, past the twelfth-century monastery of Kaisariani, surrounded by cypresses, built on the site of an ancient temple to Aphrodite. I pulled up at a curve in the road which suddenly revealed a sweeping view of the city below.

  As I studied the prospect, the slopes around me wore the Easter colors of lilacs, red poppies and yellow daisies. The air was heavy with the odor of thyme, lavender and clover. Above on the mountain’s peak was a radar station, where a statue of Zeus once stood. I knew that the secluded ravines of Hymettos had been used during the occupation by the Germans for the execution and burial of hostages. As I sat there, I admitted to myself for the first time what had brought me to Hymettos: I was looking for a place to dispose of Katis’ body.

  As Friday and Saturday passed and Palm Sunday began Holy Week, I found myself on the mountain every afternoon. Gradually my plan took shape, almost without my volition. When Katis called me I would invite him to come by the hotel at the usual visiting
hour of six-thirty, right after the siesta. I would ask him questions about the civil war and the trial of the four officers captured at Povla, his most important trial. I would phrase the questions in such a way as to inflate his ego and quash any suspicions he might have. Then I would offer to drive him back to where he was staying in Athens.

  Once Katis was in my car, I would be on the slopes of Hymettos within minutes. When he asked where we were going, I would reply that I was not quite finished asking him everything I wanted to know. We should reach Hymettos just about sunset. I knew that the drive up the mountain was closed to the public after dark, but I had often driven around the sign standing in the middle of the roadway and up the mountain to admire the view of the city at night. I never encountered a police car to stop my ascent.

  In the solitude of Hymettos after dark, I would question Katis about his role in my mother’s execution. Then I would kill him, leaving his body in a ravine, covered with branches and rocks, just as my mother’s had been. I would drive straight to the airport, taking the first plane leaving for anywhere. By the time the body was found, I would be far from Greece.

  With my plan fixed in my mind, it became harder every day to wait. My relative in the military called Katis’ son-in-law again and was told that the young man had passed on the message for his father-in-law to contact me at the Caravel. My impatience grew while I wondered if Katis suspected something. As Holy Week crept by, my hopes dwindled. I knew that by Good Friday every Greek would have returned to his home and family to celebrate the most solemn days of the Easter holiday. On Holy Wednesday I called my friend who lived in Konitsa. He casually said in answer to my questions that Katis had already come back from Athens. I hung up the receiver in despair. My preparations had been useless. Katis had ignored my message and now I would have to confront him on his home ground.