Eleni Read Free

children grow had taught me a lesson that made my mother’s story easier to confront.
    When I was young I was convinced that her existence was one of unrelieved misery because for the last decade of her life she struggled every day to keep us five children alive, despite war and famine, with no help from anyone. But as I watched my own children I realized that there must have been joy and laughter to reward her while she lived. Knowing that made it easier to face what I would learn.
    Finally, clues about the identities of some of her killers began to filter to me in Athens and I knew I couldn’t hesitate any longer. I decided to leave my job with the newspaper to devote all my energy to the search for my mother’s story.
    The first clue came from a childhood friend who told me about a visit back to Lia on a summer feast day when he fell into conversation with another villager, named Antoni Makos. Makos said that he was the thirteen-year-old boy drinking at the spring on the day my mother passed by to her execution. He told of a strange coincidence: twenty years later, in 1968, he happened to enter a bar in the northern Greek city of Yannina and recognized the owner of the place as one of the armed guerrillas who led the condemned to their deaths.
    I found Makos at the shop in a suburb of Athens where he bakes pastries for cafés. Wearing a floury apron over his ample stomach, he led me intothe back room and agreed to talk. We were both nervous: I was afraid of what I was going to hear and he was reluctant to open old wounds.
    The years had built scar tissue over the fact of my mother’s death, but there were questions gnawing at me that I had always been afraid to ask. I heard whispers that she was so badly tortured before her execution that she had to be carried up the mountain on horseback. I took a deep breath and asked Makos. When he told me that she had walked past him—barefoot, yes, on legs swollen from torture, but walking and apparently in her right mind—I felt a great weight lifted. One of the nightmarish scenes that had haunted me dissolved.
    Seeing that I wouldn’t become emotional, Makos relaxed and told me proudly about the day when he recognized the guerrilla in a soldiers’ bar in Yannina. He struck up a conversation with him and learned that he had been stationed in Lia. His name, said Makos, was Taki Cotees. If I went to Yannina, he said, to the bar just opposite the back of the military post, I’d probably find him still sitting at the same table.
    It takes only forty-five minutes to fly from Athens to Yannina, a provincial capital of crumbling minarets and peasant women in village costume. I arrived on a rainy winter day. With a distant cousin, an army major stationed there, I began combing the bars that cater to soldiers. When we reached the one Taki owned, we found that it had been closed.
    Discouraged, we went into another bar close-by where my cousin knew the bartender, a talkative fellow who said he knew Taki Cotees, who pimped for the prostitutes employed in his bar until it was closed down. Although the bartender didn’t know his present address, he volunteered that Taki was a frequent visitor to the political office of a local member of Parliament because he was trying to wheedle permission for a sister still exiled in Russia to be allowed back into Greece.
    Political patronage and reciprocal favors are the lubricants that turn every wheel in Greece. As it happened, I knew that politician from my days as a correspondent and convinced him to look up the former guerrilla’s file for me. Luckily, Taki was one of the few guerrillas who hadn’t hidden behind a
nom de guerre
during the war. The deputy called Taki into his office and introduced me as a friend from the United States, a writer who “wants some information you can give him. Please help him all you can.”
    My stomach was knotted with tension as I looked at the face of a man who, when he was twenty years old, had watched my