The next day, Holy Thursday, when in every Greek household eggs are dyed the color of Christ’s blood, I took the first plane to Yannina, arriving at about ten in the morning. I immediately began to drive toward Konitsa. For months I had been growing a beard, shot with gray at the jaw line, and I was wearing my most formal blue suit and tie. I looked older than my forty-two years and knew that as soon as I shaved and put on blue jeans, my appearance would be completely transformed.
Outside Konitsa I stopped the car and put the pistol inside my belt in the small of my back, covered by my suit coat. I also slipped a Pearlcorder tape recorder, no larger than a pack of cigarettes, in the top of my right stocking. As an investigative reporter I had used this mini-recorder many times when interviewing criminals and informants. It was a sensitive machine, which would tape up to an hour of conversation. By crossing one leg on the knee of the other I could manipulate the off-on control through the fabric of my clothing without anyone noticing. I wanted a record of what Katis and I said to each other, no matter how the conversation ended.
A single highway leads from Yannina to Konitsa and then on eastward toward Kastoria. Konitsa is built on the curved slope of hills rising in stages above the road, the houses looking down on the Aoos River Valley. To reach the home of Achilleas Lykas—Katis—one had to follow a winding, narrow road that left the main highway and snaked up the hill.
Lykas’ house was almost at the top of the village, a gleaming new two-story residence designed with stone walls and an arched wooden door for the main entrance. I rang the doorbell and heard a voice from overhead saying, “Who is it?” Looking up, I saw a handsome, dark-haired young woman in her thirties leaning from a second-story window. When I said my name she replied, “Oh yes, you want my father. My mother will come down and let you in.”
The door was opened by a plumper and older version of the daughter; a woman in her late fifties with dyed auburn hair and olive complexion, in a somber but smart brown dress. She received me hospitably and led me up marble stairs to the main living room on the second floor. To the right I saw a long hall leading to what were clearly bedrooms. The spacious living room was decorated with carved wooden furniture, Greek rugs in bright colors, and touches of local handicrafts. The wood floor shone as if it had just been waxed. Everything was new but harmonious with the traditional architecture of the town. I wondered how Katis, an unemployed former Communist justice of the peace, managed to live in such luxurious style.
The woman apologized for her husband’s tardiness—he had been napping and was now getting dressed. While we waited she served me ouzo and a cup of Greek coffee and questioned me politely but persistently about my origins. I told her that I had been born in the United States and that my parents came from the Greek town of Finiki.
From somewhere I could hear the sounds of food frying and a small child talking. I cursed my bad luck in finding Lykas surrounded by his wife, daughter and grandchildren. The craving to hurt Katis was eating at me like a tumor, but I had no appetite for harming women and children as well.
Lykas made a rather theatrical entrance. He was taller than I had expected, and despite the heat, wore a heavy gray suit. The vest was unbuttoned over a small paunch and the coat was thrown over his shoulders cape style, giving him a jaunty, military bearing. He walked with his shoulders back and his stomach projecting, his long legs slightly bent at the knees. Although he was seventy-eight years old, his arms were well-muscled and his eyes were sharp, but his gait was that of an old man. His white hair was cropped close all over his head into a military brush. Because the villagers had described Katis as gray-haired during the war, although he could have been only in his early forties at the time, I had expected him to look older than he did now. His beak of a nose had become his dominant feature, and I could see muscles and tendons working beneath the skin and the skull. Several teeth were missing on the left side, which caused his face to have a lopsided, comical air, an air that disappeared as soon as he began to speak. The voice was mellifluous, with a slight nasal quality, but the missing teeth blurred his enunciation as if he had a mouthful of something.
He introduced himself with studied dignity and shook my hand. He sat down on a chair opposite and began to quiz me about Gastis, the former guerrilla judge from Dilofo, and Kalianesis, the hotel clerk who had been the chief of staff of the Epiros Command, as if testing to see whether I really knew them. When I told him about my interviews with Gastis in his village and Kalianesis at the hotel where he worked, he seemed satisfied. I noticed that Katis’ wife ignored him, as if he wasn’t in the room, and I sensed tension between them.
“What can I do for you?” Katis asked. I began by telling him that I needed his insights for a book I was writing, especially on the subject of military justice in the DAG. I asked about the trial of the four officers, including a doctor, captured at Povla after the battle of Pergamos and tried at Tsamanta. He conceded that he had been president of the court that tried them. “Listen, Niko,” he said, assuming an earnest expression. “You did say that your name was Nicholas? Whomever we tried, we sent their cases to headquarters with the hope that their sentences would be commuted. From that point on we had no responsibility. In the case you mention, there were five judges and a prosecutor—Yiorgos Anagnostakis, who died of cancer. There was Grigori Pappas, who was the examining magistrate,” he added, naming the man who had been the third judge at my mother’s trial. “He died in Tashkent.”
His wife raised her head. “Where was he from?” she asked belligerently. “He must have been a smart one, like you!”
“Let us talk, will you?” Lykas snapped. Turning to me he said, “She’s a nervous woman. We were separated for so long. Twelve years.”
“Twelve!” his wife exploded. “It was seventeen! Seventeen years! My daughter was one month old. He was going to free the world, my hero there,” she added contemptuously.
“Will you stop?” Katis said in a louder voice. “Will you let me speak to this man? Or shall we get up and leave? We know all about your ordeals! You don’t have to keep telling us.”
Katis began to explain how he had gone to the mountains to join the guerrillas in 1945. He had been a justice of the peace in Konitsa, and after the war, informers identified him as a sympathizer of ELAS. Afraid that he would be imprisoned or worse, he joined the DAG. I brought him back to the subject of the four executed officers and he repeated that as president of the court, he had sentenced them with the hope that they would be pardoned. “We rendered the verdict that we were called on to give,” he added. “The responsibility for the fate of the four men rested with Koliyiannis.”
I asked if the accused had anyone to represent them at the trial, a defense attorney or counsel. “Counsel?” Katis uttered a short laugh. “Where do you think we were? These were military trials in the mountains!”
There was another incident I wanted to ask him about, I said, and I noticed that my words became slower as I got nearer the point. “There was a trial of civilians in Lia in which you took part.”
“No, no!” he interjected before I finished the sentence. “I tried no civilians.”
“But there were three hundred villagers present,” I said. “They all remember you.”
He was becoming uneasy and kept uttering denials before I could complete my questions. “They are wrong!” he said. “They made a mistake. I tried no civilians.”
“The villagers all remember Katis,” I said. “Didn’t they call you Katis?”
“No, I had no pseudonym.”
“All the guerrillas I interviewed told me you were called Katis. Your friends Kalianesis and Gastis both told me that ‘Katis’ was the name of Achilleas Lykas from Konitsa. Now you tell me you never used the name.”
He sat up straighter. “I have no connection with any Katis,” he said, waving the question away with his hand. “The important thing is that all those matters were settled at headquarters by Koliyiannis. No one else was responsible. Not Kalianesis, the chief of
staff. Not Chimaros, the military commander. Not the military courts. We did our duty, and we sentenced everyone with the wish that they would be pardoned.”
He stood up abruptly. “That’s it,” he said, his manner a model of magisterial hauteur. “Do we have anything else to discuss?”
His arrogance infuriated me. “Aren’t you ever going to admit the truth?” I snapped.
“That is the truth,” he said, and shrugged. “What am I telling you—lies?”
I began to speak very slowly and clearly, trying to organize my thoughts. My hatred for the man began to blur my planned series of questions. “Listen, Lykas,” I said. “I have come a long way to see you, and as you can surmise, I have talked to a lot of people already. I know everything that happened, so I don’t want to hear lies from you—”
Unexpectedly, his wife broke in. “Listen to him,” she admonished.
Katis glanced at her and sat down with a harassed expression. “I’m listening.”
“In the village of Lia,” I began, finding my breath with difficulty, “there was a trial of five people. The president of the village. His nephew, eighteen years old. Another man, fifty-seven years old—”
“I told you—”
“Wait, wait …”
“Don’t tell me anything!” he exclaimed. “You can tell me we tried fifty. I’ll let you, if that’s what you want …”
“Are you going to let me finish?”
“No!” he shouted, still trying to dismiss me. “I won’t let you because you’re saying things that are not supportable! The only persons I tried are the officers and the doctor I told you about.”
“There were five people executed in Lia,” I continued doggedly. I was determined to get it all out no matter how many times he tried to stop me. “Three men and two women. The trial began in the village square and then because of artillery fire from the Great Ridge it was transferred to a ravine at the top of the village covered by trees—”
“I don’t know anything about any Great Ridge or any military trial taken from one place to another,” he exploded.
“I know you’re lying because—”
“You won’t tell me any more because our conversation is over!”
“You’re covering up!” I shouted.
His voice rose in pitch. “Do you hear me? What I have told you is it! I have nothing more to say. It’s past. It’s over!”
“It’s not over for me,” I said.
He had me figured out by now. “I don’t know. For you it may not be over, of course,” he said without concern, “because I don’t know who you are and what you’re harboring or if you had some relative who was a victim.”
His wife’s eyes were going from my face to his, registering astonishment at what was happening in her living room.
“I have,” I nodded. “And you were the cause. I was nine years old and they took my mother and they tried her on August twenty-first in front of the entire village. Everyone was there. And they took her on August twenty-eighth above the village and they shot her—”
“Listen, Nikola,” Katis broke in.
“—and now you pretend you know nothing!” I finished. “Why don’t you tell the truth? Why do you lie even now?”
Katis was trying to calm me. “Why don’t you go to the courts?” he asked. “Why don’t you follow a judicial—”
“You know the law,” I broke in. “You know that the statute of limitations lapses after thirty years, even for murder!”
Katis pulled himself up coldly. “That is your own affair,” he said. “The only trial I presided over was for the officers and the doctor. I told you about that.”
I was beginning to stammer in my anger. “I want to ask you one thing.”
“Yes,” he replied.
“The last day of my mother’s life, August twenty-eighth, they let one of my sisters see her one last time.” I was trying to remind him of the moment my mother had asked him something on behalf of her daughter, but I was having trouble getting it out.
“Yes,” he encouraged.
“Eleni Gatzoyiannis. Her name was Eleni Gatzoyiannis.”
“Eleni Gatzoyiannis,” he repeated, wrinkling his brow. “I never heard of her. If others tried her, I don’t know.”
“You presided,” I said.
“I never tried any woman,” he intoned. “I am being serious now. This is not a matter for—”
His wife broke in, her face twisted with uncertainty. “Maybe you made a mistake,” she said to me.
“There were three hundred people at the trial,” I replied. “Are all of them lying?”
Katis shook his head. “I don’t remember more than fifty people at any trial. I remember once there was a woman in Presba …”
He proceeded to tell me about a trial that took place on Vitsi, where he claimed to have saved a woman from being sentenced to death, but I wouldn’t let him finish, or even stop to point out that he was contradicting what he had just said about having presided at only one trial. I was determined to get to the last act in my mother’s life, in which he was a participant.
“And on the day my mother died …” I said.
“Don’t blame me for any woman’s death!” Katis shouted. “I’m offended!”
“You’re offended? You killed my mother!”
“I am not involved.” He was speaking now with his former magisterial loftiness.
“You are responsible!”
“If you please! I was not involved in the trial of any woman.”
“I can bring you dozens of witnesses,” I insisted.
“I was involved in the trial of those officers, yes, but Eleni Gatzoyiannis I never tried,” he repeated. “You have to find out who did.”
“I’ve found him,” I shouted. My hand had retreated behind my back to the gun, hard and cold under my palm. “Three hundred people aren’t all lying.”
“You have been given wrong information, my friend,” Katis insisted. “I wasn’t in the Mourgana long. I left there when Mourgana fell, I went to Grammos and Vitsi.”
“That was on September sixteenth,” I said.
“Exactly,” he nodded.
“My mother was tried on August twenty-first and executed on August twenty-eighth.”
Katis laughed harshly, the sound echoing in the silent room. “Impossible!” he exclaimed. “We were preparing the evacuation then.”
“Then you’re telling me my mother wasn’t shot?” I asked, my voice rising. “She’s still alive?” I turned toward his wife, whose face showed that she was beginning to absorb what I was saying with a horrified conviction that it was true. “They took them up to the ravine, Kyria,” I said, speaking to her now, trying not to look at his face, contorted and staring in hatred. “And they shot them and threw them into a gully without even burying them.” I turned back to Katis, who kept saying, “Listen! … Listen!”
“And when my grandfather went to find her body …”
At that point my voice failed me completely and I couldn’t say another word. I had my hand on the gun and while I was talking, thoughts were passing through my mind; images really, flashing by like a slide show run at a manic pace. My mother’s body. My son’s face—the same age now that I was when my mother died.
I knew now absolutely that I wanted to kill Katis. But the logical part of my mind was telling me there was only one road out of town. To have any chance of escaping, I would have to kill Katis’ wife as well, who had been listening to me with compassion and belief, and his daughter, too, who was somewhere inside with her child. Or I would kill only him, and the women would call the police and have me arrested before I was out of Konitsa.
While we were arguing, I had time to wonder what would become of my children. The thought was holding me back. I wanted to goad him until he came at me. The touch of his hand would drive out reason, propelling me into action. I needed to be pushed beyond logic to forget everything but my hatred. If he attacked me, I knew I would be able to shoot him without refle
cting on the consequences, and I desperately wanted to see his blood spilling out, staining the rugs at our feet.
The thought of my grandfather uncovering my mother’s body drove me over the edge, and words gave way to action. I stood up and spat on him. There was enough saliva to cover his twitching face and drip down his neat shirt and vest. In Greece, to spit on someone is the worst possible insult, worse than the most terrible verbal abuse, a slap or a blow. Katis leaped to his feet, and for an instant he was the guerrilla judge in the prime of his strength and power. “You spit on me? On me! Do you know who I am?” he bellowed. I waited for his blow to fall, wishing for it, to be answered by the sound of my gun. But his wife jumped up. Perhaps she saw my hand behind me, perhaps not. Her shrill voice shattered the moment of frozen silence as we faced each other.
“Achilleas! Stop! Don’t you move!” she screamed.
Slowly his hands opened, no longer fists, and he slumped back into his chair, his face dripping with my spittle.
The moment was gone. He had collapsed into an old man as his wife stood, waving her hands excitedly. Drawn by the commotion, his daughter appeared at the door. “What’s happened?” she cried. “What’s going on here?”
I turned to her. “My mother was murdered,” I told her, “and your father was responsible.”
She looked at me as if suddenly understanding everything. “Ah, that’s why you came here,” she said.
“That’s why,” I replied and started for the door. I could still hear Katis’ wife exclaiming as I slammed the door with a report like the pistol shot I had been waiting for. The moment had slipped past and I hadn’t done it.
There’s no other sound on the tape but the quick rhythm of my footsteps on the gravel, going on and on.
As I drove back toward Yannina, everything around me in the sunlit landscape seemed changed, warped, as if seen under water. I was sick with frustration. I had looked on the face of Katis and he was still alive. I had acted in the heat of my emotions, but at the critical moment, something stopped me. If only he had come at me, I knew I would have shot him. Now I was cheated of the satisfaction I had been pursuing for so long. The pain that had brought me to his door was stronger than ever.
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