Eleni Read Free Page A

mother die, perhaps even fired one of the shots. Taki bore no resemblance to my image of him. He was a small, frail, gnomelike man, untidy wisps of gray hair spiking out around his bald pate, his lower face caved in around an overbite. He had the sly, shriveled look of a doll made from a dried apple. The only thing still young about him was his eyes, which were a startling gold color and darted about nervously.
    Taki listened obsequiously to what the deputy said, and nodded. He promised to do whatever he could. I steered the former guerrilla to myrented car, and once he was inside, began to drive aimlessly, leaving the city behind, meanwhile asking about where he spent the war. He was posted in the Mourgana village of Lia, Taki said.
    Weren’t there five people from that village executed? I asked.
    Taki frowned. Yes, he had been at the execution himself, he said, as one of the guards. No, not on the firing squad; that was made up of guerrillas stationed higher up the mountain who came down to the killing ground. Those executions were a very bad thing, he opined, shaking his head. One of those killed was an eighteen-year-old boy, one of their own guerrillas, who was charged with treason. After the execution, Taki said, he had personally filed a complaint with his commander about the boy’s murder.
    Did he remember two women? I asked.
    He thought for a moment. One was a woman with light-brown hair who had a home near the church at the western edge of the village, he recalled, a house with a mulberry tree nearby. That house had been used as the jail and he had been posted there as a guard. Taki was getting visibly uneasy, watching the deserted countryside flash by. “Was that woman related to you?” he asked.
    I told him who she was. Taki became more agitated and suggested that we stop somewhere for coffee. He knew that in my car, on these lonely roads, he was in a vulnerable position. But once we stopped and he found himself in the security of a well-lit roadside café, he relaxed a little and described what he remembered of the executions. He was still trying to appear helpful. Clearly, he thought that I could use my influence with the deputy to bring his exiled sister back from Tashkent. He even promised to travel with me to Lia to the execution site, where he would try to remember more details. It was a promise that he would repeat several times but never keep. Every time I tried to get him to fix a date to go to the village he’d find some excuse to cancel it as the last moment, no doubt for fear of what might happen if we found ourselves alone in the isolated ravine where my mother died.
    During several subsequent meetings with Taki in Yannina, I pumped him for the names of his guerrilla superiors and the men who served as judges at my mother’s trial. His memory was blurred and he could only give me the pseudonym of one of the judges—Yiorgos Economou—but, he added, it was another judge who was head of the court.
    Taki was a repulsive little man who combined shallow cunning and false amiability, but I believed his account of the execution, as much as he remembered it; he was convincingly angry about the murders because they hurt the cause of Communism in the village and claimed one of his fellow guerrillas. In our last meeting, which took place in the nearly empty bar section of the lobby of Yannina’s largest hotel, I pressed Taki to remember details of the tortures that the prisoners had been subjected to during the twenty days he stood guard duty outside the jail in Lia. He admitted he had seen one of the woman prisoners being interrogated in the garden. It wasthe woman with the light-chestnut hair, the owner of the house that was the jail, he said. While other guerrillas hit her, one of them held her shoulders and pressed his knee against her back.
    I stared at him uncomprehendingly and asked him to repeat it. He went over it several times but I still looked blank. I didn’t understand how the guerrilla