by Tony Kaplan
The Germans treated the villager’s worse than how the villagers treated their livestock. The invaders confiscated for their own use the grain and potatoes the village people had saved for the winter. They slaughtered the few animals the villagers still had so that German officers should not have to go without meat. They arrested and tortured local men and women for the names of the sympathizers providing intelligence or succour to the ELAS resistance fighter, the andartes, hidden in caves and mountain camps.
At the beginning of the war, ELAS, the Communist Partisan Army, started as small bands of poorly-organized fighters. But as the Germans’ cruelty became relentless, more and more people joined the resistance. The Germans retaliation against any village seen to be supporting ELAS was punctilious and stark – anyone caught supporting the guerrillas was executed in the square in front of the assembled villagers and the home of their family burnt to the ground. Many old people and children (including Gregorio’s grandmother and two of his cousins) starved to death in the next two winters.
When Gregorio’s uncle (his mother’s brother) was casually executed by the Germans for hiding his corn, Gregorio was so full of hate for the Germans, that without telling his mother that he was leaving (he knew she would try to stop him), he went to join the partisans. He was fifteen. It was his new comrades who gave him the name, the nom de guerre, Mavros (“Blackie”), the name he would keep for the rest of his life. It was for him a medal.
He was a brave fighter. His knowledge as a shepherd, was invaluable when it came to identifying the most propitious places to ambush German patrols. It turned out he was also good with the old Lee Enfield rifles, smuggled to the ELAS partisans by the British SOE, which had last seen action in the war against the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the century.
Mavros killed Germans dispassionately, but like his commander, General Markos, his special ire was reserved for the collaborators of Rallis’s Security Battalions, his fascist countrymen. General Markos - Markos Vafiades - the leader of ELAS in the Grammos Mountains was fond of Mavros, this boy who could fight as fiercely as any man under his command. He kept Mavros close and took it upon himself to educate him. Although Mavros never learned to read or write, he could recite, with heartfelt passion, the tracts of Marx and Lenin that General Markos taught him.
By 1944 the Germans and nationalist army were in retreat and the units which Markos led was making a push towards Athens. In May of that year, General Scobie, commander of the British forces, landed from the sea and by October, Athens was liberated. He instructed ELAS to wait outside the city for the Greek Government-in-exile to arrive from Cairo. So, when the people of Athens shouted, “Laokratia!” “Freedom!”, singing in praise and rapture for their liberators, it was the British and the Right-wing nationalist soldiers they lauded, not the ELAS fighters, the andartes, who had suffered so severely and fought so bravely.
This was not to be the only outrage. ELAS and the communists, the KKE, controlled most of the country outside the cities and they expected to be part of the new government. But this was not what the British and Americans had in mind. To decide the fate of the liberated lands, Churchill (or “Tsortsil” as he is better known in Greece) made a deal with Stalin over a leisurely lunch – Stalin got the East – Bulgaria, Romania; the British got Greece. The “plan” was drawn out on the back of a serviette. With such thin threads is history woven. So determining was Churchill’s anti-communist and pro-Royalist doctrine, the British released fascist collaborators and incorporated them into the new army and police force and demanded that the ELAS disarm. ELAS fighters were prohibited from joining the new army. The Communist ministers, who had joined the government of national unity under George Papandreou, were incensed and resigned. Stalin was indifferent.
The communists called a General Strike. It took the government, with assistance from British tanks and Spitfires, thirty days to put down the popular uprising. George Papandreou, to his credit, resigned. Then the crackdown on the Communists in Athens and Thessalonika started in earnest. 12,000 men and women of the Greek Left were arrested and interned in the concentration camp on Macronissos. So, ELAS went back to where they had support, to the countryside, to the mountains and took up arms again, in what was to become the Greek Civil War.
Mavros ended up back in his village, where he was reunited with his mother. Made old and decrepit by the hardship she had suffered, she could do with his help. She found him a wife, a woman as young as Mavros, the cousin of her neighbour, also an ELAS combatant. There was no big wedding – they were poor people, they had nothing, they were at war - but still, for that night, there was dancing in the square.
Through the Civil War, until the ignominious end in 1949, Mavros and his wife fought side by side in the Grammos mountains. But in one of the last battles of the war, Mavros’s wife was killed. It was a terrible time. The deadlock was broken by aeroplanes of the Greek Nationalist government whose pilots were trained by the Americans to drop napalm in vast quantities, the first time the Americans had experimented with this new weapon. Crops destroyed, water supplies poisoned, the peasants were starved into surrender.
So, when there was no more hope for ELAS, Mavros walked over the mountains in the east, first to Bulgaria, and then to Soviet Union.
But in 1960, his mother died in the same house Mavros had known as a child; Mavros came back to bury her, crossing the border on foot again under cover of darkness. The Greek government at that time still prohibited the ELAS exiles returning to Greece. In his village, of course people knew him to be an ELAS fighter of old, so it was not safe for him to settle there. After he buried his mother and put a stone on her grave, he went to Thessaloniki. He had comrades there. They could find him a job, get him papers.
The job he ended up with was as a driver for the Left-wing politician, Grigoris Lambrakis. The anti-Royalist Left, under George Papandreou, was gaining popularity. This alarmed the British and the Americans and the Greek fascist Right, the remnants of the Security Battalion the Allies had nurtured.
In 1963, Mavros’s boss, Lambrakis, was gunned down. Mavros saw the gunmen and recognised one of the gunmen as an off-duty policeman. He was arrested and tortured, but he found a way to escape and fled to Athens, where he was taken in by sympathizers, one of whom was the father of my informant, who smuggled him out of the capital to the island of Mythos where he had relatives.
Mavros fell in love with a local woman, a refugee from Smyrna, Stavroula Vogiatsis, and within a month, using his falsified papers, Mavros married her and soon they had a child. Even after Papandreou was elected in 1966, Mavros still could not get legal documents (ELAS fighters were pardoned only in 1981, when the radical Andreas Papandreou, son of George, was elected) and could not leave the island.
Then in 1967, with NATO’s covert support, the King and the Generals forced Papandreou out of power. But the new junta were not anti-communist enough for the far-Right and the Colonels – the remnant of the Security Battalion – with the collusion of the CIA, deposed them, the King and his conspiring German wife and the luckless Papandreou Senior, went into exile.
Then in 1970, Mavros disappeared.
Until now.
The body will be shipped to Athens where forensic analysis will confirm his identity. The Left's fight to have ELAS fighters memorialized gains pace. The Struggle continues.
Tom Pickering.
Mythos. September, 2005.
13
I wake the next morning, stiff from sleeping with my legs hunched up to accommodate my length on Lucy’s couch. Lucy is still not back. I make myself an instant coffee with the stale powder I find in a drawer; I sit, drinking it, on the back porch, watching the haze lift off the mountains. Where are you, Lucy? Fuck it! This is a bit much, going off like that without even a note to say when you’ll be back. I toss my coffee away - I can’t drink this shit.
I can’t just hang about doing nothing. If I am going to cover the body in the bridge story properly, I suppose I can’t just rel
y on Antonis for transport. I need wheels of my own. I saw a sign on the main road as we came into the village, which said something like, “Zeus Autos”. I remember thinking that sounded quite grand. I could try them.
I take my wallet, check I have my British driver’s license and set off. I find Zeus Autos on the back road running parallel to the main road. Zeus Autos consists of a garage with a truck up on a ramp, its tyres off, and a side lot, on which stands three motor bikes, a 125cc scrambler, a 50cc Honda and a dilapidated Vespa. No cars. A bulky man in an oil-smothered blue overall is working under the truck, unlit cigarette perched at the corner of his mouth.
“Kalimera,” I say tentatively.
The mechanic is startled, then looks at me coolly. “Nai?” he asks.
“Parakalo. You make rent… car?” I ask in my English for Greeks.
“Speak English!” he instructs me, the cigarette wobbles as he speaks. He establishes I want to hire a vehicle and that I am presently on my own. “A motorbike is better,” he tells me. He doesn’t have any cars. He walks me to the lot and wiping his oily hands on an oily cloth, takes the scrambler off its stand. “This one,” he says. “Ten euros for a day. Fifty euros if you take it for the whole week.” That sounds very reasonable. I get on the bike and fiddle with the gears and brakes. “Is all fine,” he says, “Brakes, mirrors, engine, everything. Petrol – full tank.” He doesn’t ask to see my license. I don’t tell him I haven’t ridden a motorbike since I was a teenager. I think it will come back to me. I sign a book he produces. He tears out the under-slip as proof of our deal. He has not smiled once, nor moved the cigarette from the corner of his mouth.
I drive out the lot, unsteady on the rough road. But I am grinning like an idiot, a surging feeling of liberation, memories of my adolescence tickling me… my first girlfriend, us going to crap pubs in Hertfordshire next to the canal, which didn’t bother to check our age. I ride out the village and out along the coast, the road north unfurling, at first through forest, then a harsh barren land of stone and desiccated bush. I have not been north from the village before. The bridge and beyond it, the main port town, Agia Sofia, lie to the south. I should have asked for a map, but then again the island is small – how lost can I get?
The road takes me up onto a promontory where an old block house lies abandoned, staring with blind eyes out to sea. From here the road seems to sweep south again, if my sense of direction is valid, across the ridge of the mountain, until I come to a ravine, at which point the road winds steeply down though a forested hillside and at the bottom, the enticing turquoise of the sea. The view is spectacular. Cliffs plummet into the sea. Mountains rise majestically out of the blue water, fringed with turquoise and aquamarine. I wish I had brought my camera. I brake, skid and shudder to a halt. The bike cuts out. I put it on its stand, I look over the land and out to the horizon, shimmering in the midday sun. My body is still vibrating from the unfamiliar thrum of the motorbike. Around me there is complete silence, such an abnormal sound to my city ears. I am all alone on this mountain top. This view is mine alone.
On the hillside, opposite in the distance, I see a steeply angled road, recently tarred judging by its stark blackness. Construction vehicles lie silent at the roadside. The entire hillside and the mountainside beyond for miles, is charred and barren. The blackened corpses of small trees stick their fingers into the air in an arthritic death dance; grey pines hang their head, downcast. My eyes track down and near the bottom of the gradient, just beyond the firebreak, I see a new development, a smart new hotel complex, three levels of balconies and buttresses in white and glass, with numerous neat out-houses and a swimming pool, pale blue and regular, cut into a lawn – surely not a lawn? In this climate? The Poseidon – this must be the Poseidon. Construction is still going on. I can see activity – vehicles, tiny figures - but from this distance this all takes place in silence, like a movie with the sound turned off.
Beyond the hotel and the outcrops of rock which divide the coast into pretty, white-sanded coves, there is a lagoon surrounded by reeds and low bushes. The lagoon is an iridescent green. I can see specks of birdlife on the surface. The sea, where the lagoon attempts to regurgitate itself – is it semi-tidal? – bears a dark maroon stain, with, at its centre, a dollop of pink and cream. The red-brown smudge tapers toward the hotel but stops well short. It is probably not visible from the hotel. Is it a natural formation or is it a sludge of algal growth, pollution? Is that what Lucy is investigating?
I kick-start the bike and it comes to life with an encouraging roar. That’s-my-boy! Should I go down to the Poseidon and introduce myself? Maybe they will know where Lucy is. On the other hand, I don’t want to blow her cover. I don’t know what she has told them about her interest. Maybe I should wait. I turn the bike around and go back to Agia Anna, the way I came.
****
Back in the village, I go past Lucy’s, but she’s still not at home. I think to ask the old lady across the road whether she’s seen her, but the effort in trying to make myself understood and then trying to understand her, is too much. I haven’t had lunch either. I’ll go to The Seaview, get a Greek salad or a small plate of calamari and go online. See if there are any messages.
I should have eaten first. I lose my appetite and my feeling of goodwill is instantly macerated when I open my Outlook and find a message from Lucy. Excitedly I click to open it.
“Dear Thomas, I am going away. Do not wait for me. I will write you. Lucy.”
For a moment I don’t believe what I am reading. I have to read it again. “Do not wait for me.” Jesus, no sugaring the pill; no trying to be nice. I’ve come all this way and she’s given me the brush off. Plus, her tone – so matter-of-fact. She should have put in a ‘Yours sincerely’ at the end too! Fuck her! She is so mercurial, so fucking fickle. I’ve come all this way…
I shouldn’t have got my hopes up. I realise I have made a lot out of that “I miss you.” I have been so presumptuous! But not groundless - there was something – something in her tone on the phone in that message in London that promised more. Could it be I just imagined it? – wished it into being? But then again Irini had said Lucy was fond of me. How well does Irini really know her friend? – or was Irini just being manipulative as I first suspected? Fuck, I should have listened to that nagging little voice of doubt that has served me so well over the years. I should not have listened to my fuck-up of a sister.
I sit in a dark silence, too angry to breathe, too hurt to cry. Eventually, the intensity of my disappointment dissipates. I breathe. I sigh. I unwind my shoulders.
Then I send Lucy a message back, telling her, as coolly as I can muster, that I’m covering the body in the bridge story, so I’ll be around for a while yet and hope to see her still. Do I actually want to stay for the bridge story now? Well, if I am going to be working, may as well be on a Greek island in the sun. Then if Lucy comes back, maybe I can still change her mind. If I still want to. Now I’m not so sure. Do I want someone so unreliable in my life? Depressing.
14
One year before. The Netherlands. November, 2004.
A wet Holland with ponderous charcoal skies. It’s the morning session of the third day of the international Greens’ conference in the Hague, which I’m covering for New World Order. I am in an over-heated auditorium, gainfully struggling against the cozy seduction of light slumber, when I glimpse the next speaker, shuffling her papers into order and tapping the microphone. I recognise her. Alert now, I quickly check the programme notes. Lucy Discombe.
Lucy, the programme notes tell me, has recently completed her Masters in Human Geography and is working for an NGO in the Netherlands, and will give a seminar on the effects of mass tourism on coastlines in the Third World. I stare at her, trying to get her to conform to the memory of her I have as a seventeen-year-old at my mother’s house in Islington four and a half years ago. The young woman at the podium is a confidant speaker. Her passion for the legal rights of the natural world is perhaps too striden
t, but then she is only twenty-three (by my rapid calculation). I quote two of her declamations in my report later: “The natural world can cope without Humanity, but Humanity cannot cope without the natural world. So, who has the power?” and “Don’t treat the Earth as a dependent child, in need of care, when it is your mother, who cares for you. Show respect.” She sounds older and wiser than her twenty-three years, and to my eyes, and I’m sure to most of the audience, she is astonishingly beautiful in the spotlight.
Afterwards, I seek her out. My pretext is that I want to do an interview for New World Order, but actually I just want to be close to her beauty; I want to apologise for what a shit I was when we last met. I stand at the back of a gaggle of earnest and fawning fresh-faced young people (students I presume), waiting my turn with her. Will she know who I am? Will she want to see me? She catches my eye, smiles and tilts her head, a question, a surprise. I start to introduce myself, but she stops me. “Jesus, Tom, of course I remember you! - you were the reason I majored in Human Geography.” She steps towards me and gives me a kiss on the cheek. I feel myself blush. I pretend nonchalance as I bask in the warm glow of her adulation in front of the acolytes waiting to ask her learned questions designed to reveal how clever they are. When she’s done, we stand about awkwardly, until I get up the courage to ask her if maybe we could go for a drink in a quiet bar where we could talk and be heard. “Good plan, Batman,” she says, a soft fist playfully applied to my arm. A punch withheld? She is toying with the ambiguity, not ready yet to concede forgiveness, and I think she likes to see that I feel guilty.