Eleni Read Free Page B

could hold her shoulders and put his knee on her back at the same time.
    Taki and I were sitting side by side on a couch with a marble coffee table in front of us. Finally he stood up with a shrug and motioned for me to stand. After looking around to be sure no one was watching, with an apologetic smile he went behind me and seized my shoulders. Taki was several inches shorter than I was, a frail man of fifty-two whom I could easily overpower in a fight. From behind he grasped my arms just below the shoulders, then lifted his knee and placed it in the small of my back. Then he twisted my arms back at an angle that threatened to dislocate them from the sockets and pushed with his knee against the curve of my spine. He didn’t apply much pressure; it was only a friendly demonstration.
    I felt myself in a position that left me totally helpless. The inability to move, coupled with the pressure on the fragile vertebrae of the spine, was the surprising thing. I pictured my backbone snapping like that of a fish on a plate. A startling pain, considering the lack of force, shot up across my shoulders into the base of my skull.
    With a nervous chuckle Taki released me and sat down again. He continued talking, but I didn’t hear anything he said. I was perspiring and there was a roaring inside my head. That one flash of pain had left me weak as a child, not because of the pain itself, but because I had suddenly imagined it magnified many times over, heightened by fear and being done to my mother. For an instant I had felt a tiny fraction of the suffering she experienced, day after day, increasing in viciousness until she was killed.
    The reality of the pain washed my mind clear of illusion. In that split second, in the hotel lobby in Yannina, I realized what I hadn’t yet admitted to myself: it wasn’t enough to find out the details of her torments. The only way I could live with that knowledge and find some sort of relief was to exact payment in kind for the agony she had gone through. That day was the first time I understood that my search for my mother’s killers would not end when I wrote her story. I had to go a step further and make them suffer the way they hurt her.
    Face to face for the first time with the need for revenge which possessed me, I had a quick image of smashing Taki’s smiling face open on the marble table before us, but I sat there, forcing myself not to move as he talked on. Taki was not the proper object of my rage; he was a nonentity, only a bit player in my mother’s murder. Besides, a fistfight in a hotel lobby would spoil any hope I had of finding the rightful target, the person whose hands were stained with her blood.
    I didn’t meet with Taki again. The sight of him turned my stomach, andhe had told me everything he knew about the judges. I would have to uncover the rest by other means. So before I left Yannina I stopped at the small apartment of a woman named Dina Venetis. She is one of the few prisoners held captive in the cellar jail in Lia who survived to tell what went on there. Dina had been on trial with my mother but she was exonerated and set free. I wanted to find out what she remembered of the judges.
    Dina is now an unremarkable matron with grizzled short hair, and a kindly smile revealing three gold teeth, but once she was a beauty. Photographs taken before the war show a dark, sultry-looking young woman in a black kerchief, with a full mouth, high cheekbones and black-fringed eyes staring solemnly at the camera. When the guerrillas arrested her, leaving her three small children unprotected in the house, her husband was somewhere in the south, fighting on the side of the Greek government forces.
    Dina welcomed me hospitably into her stuffy apartment, crowded with memorabilia of her children, including the small son taken from her by the guerrillas and sent to a camp in Russia for seven years. She shook her head when I asked her about the judge called Yiorgos Economou; the only judge who