ARRIVAL IN THIS barren place seemed just another test of endurance and Themis told herself that she would survive.
‘Long Live the King’. Even the tone of the message on the hillside seemed comparatively mild, compared with slogans that had been hurled at her in past months: accusations of bandit, slut and whore.
Men and women were divided and soldiers barked out instructions. The men were the first to march beneath a giant archway. Themis took in the words written above their heads:
I MAKRONISOS SAS KALOSORIZEI
MAKRONISOS WELCOMES YOU
She had heard many stories about Makronisos. All of them were second-hand and she now wondered if they had been exaggerated. After more than a year living rough as a soldier, followed by the horrors of prison, the sight of ordered rows of tents enough to accommodate tens of thousands was almost welcome. They rose up the hillsides in every direction, fanning out into the distance as far as the eye could see. In her state of weariness, her only thought was that perhaps there might even be something other than hard ground to lie on.
Many years before, on one of the few occasions their father had taken them out of Athens, she and her siblings had gone to Cape Sounion. She recalled looking across the sea towards the barren, colourless island in front of them. ‘Uninhabitable and uninhabited’ was how her father had described it and she could hear his almost dismissive words even now.
Nowadays it clearly was inhabited and, as she soon learnt, new legislation had been passed, allowing the island to take in women as well as men for ‘correction’.
The place teemed mostly with young government soldiers, smartly dressed in pale uniforms, well shaved, hair neatly clipped. It looked like a well-organised army camp, not the bare, empty island she had always imagined. It was full of noise: music, announcements, shouts, the chanting of priests.
Themis searched the crowd for the two faces she longed to see. With such a sizeable population, perhaps Tasos or even Panos might be here, and if they were not here yet, there was a possibility that they might arrive. Even now as she looked out to sea, there was another small boat making its way across the choppy waters and her spirits rose a little.
A nudge in the ribs broke her reverie.
‘Come on,’ her neighbour urged. ‘Our turn.’
It was time for their group to make an official entrance. As they passed beneath the archway, a blast of military brass fanfared them. Her stomach still churning from the roughness of the sea and her eyes dazzled by the low sun, Themis struggled to make sense of what was going on around her.
On the other side of the archway, everything seemed to change. She stumbled across the stony ground, the wind whipping dust and grit into her eyes, nose and mouth. Announcements were being broadcast through a loudspeaker but they were incomprehensible and clashed with the sound of brass and drums.
Narrowing her eyes and keeping her face to the ground, Themis followed the feet in front of her. At one point she looked up to see one woman being mercilessly whipped by another. A group of male soldiers was observing and laughing. It seemed to be purely for their entertainment.
‘You are nothing! Do you hear me?’
The victim was cowering from the blows, neither screaming nor crying. Her silence only made her seem more vulnerable.
‘Eísai ethnomíasma! You are a germ! A germ that will destroy our nation.’
Themis looked away, feeling vicarious shame for the unknown woman. She did not want to add her own stares to those of the people jeering and hurling abuse.
‘Symmorítissa!’ some of them shrieked at her. ‘Bandit!’
‘Bulgarian!’ shouted some others.
Themis noticed the joshing between the assailant and one of the men, whose trousers were falling down around his ankles.
‘And you’re a thief too,’ he cackled. ‘Give me back my belt!’
The whipping stopped as the woman doing the beating returned his belt to him.
Everyone in the group held their sides with laughter.
Themis turned away and continued to trudge. Ten or fifteen minutes passed before she looked up again. As she did, she noticed the cold eyes of the men who passed in the opposite direction. Their lack of expression was chilling.
When they finally came to a halt, Themis’ group of twenty was lined up before a figure who was waiting to address them. With the sun setting behind him, all they could see was a silhouette.
‘Welcome,’ he said before a dramatic pause. ‘Alas, each one of you has stepped from the natural ways of womankind.’
The voice was deep and disarmingly gentle.
‘But you are the lucky ones. Here on this island, we can help bring you back to the right path. You will acknowledge the errors you have made and repent of your ways. Don’t think of this place as a prison but as a place for correction.’
There was not a single murmur of dissent. His tone was kind, contrasting dramatically with the cruelty and abuse that was all they had heard in past weeks and months. Themis listened to the words carefully.
The speech continued but the tone changed to one of ex-hortation.
‘There is only one path home, only one route to reunion with your family. It is very simple.’
Then they heard a new word. From now on they would hear it so often that it would be like a breath or a noise.
‘You will all sign a dílosi. And when you do, you will go home to where you belong. Your families will be waiting with open arms.’
Dílosi metanoías. A declaration of repentance. Dílosi, dílosi, dílosi . . . The word would ring in their ears.
Themis found it ridiculous. She would never repent of fighting for her rights, against a regime where so many had collaborated with the Nazis.
Pointing towards Cape Sounion, the speaker came to the climax of his speech.
‘Imagine yourselves back on the mainland. Your consciences clear. Women once again. Fully Greek. Fully alive.’
He paused for a moment, almost as if he expected applause, then turned away and marched back towards the sea.
His pseudo concern was soon replaced by the overt cruelty of their female guards.
Marched to a tent that would be shared by fifty of them, they were given thin cotton dresses and Themis found herself struggling to do up the buttons, her fingers were so frozen by the cold. She did not ask anyone for help. This time she would try to limit the possibilities of pain and loss. There would be no Katerina.
Their tatty communist army uniforms were left in a pile outside the tent and later that day Themis watched as the trousers of which she had been so proud were put in a pile with others, set on fire and reduced to ash.
At first, some of the women assigned to guard their tent were kind enough and Themis soon realised that they were prisoners who had already signed a dílosi. Their mission was to encourage their charges to do the same.
The majority of the women in Themis’ tent were stubborn, and none would easily turn her back on her beliefs. Many of them had recently been transferred to Makronisos from Trikeri and they regarded themselves as the hardest to crack. They even looked different, their lined faces deeply scored by sun and wind.
Themis had experienced the brutality of a policeman’s whip and a soldier’s boot but now she and the others were subjected to periods of pointless and gruelling labour. Day after day, they were forced to carry rocks from one location to another.
When the sun started to go down, physical work ended and indoctrination began, including the obligatory singing of patriotic songs and marching. It was a daily requirement to sit for hours on end in the huge concrete stadium. Unprotected from the fierce wind that constantly battered this barren rock and unpredictable showers of hail and heavy rain, they listened to the droning voices of their captors. What Themis hated most of all were the haranguing speeches they were subjected to, but she had long ago developed a way of shutting down her senses, appearing to concentrate while not really hearing. At least these hours gave them some repose and Themis obligingly stood when necessary to sing, separating thought from action as she had practised with Fotini.
The women in the tent reinforced each other’s resolve. ‘Never, never, never,’ they said under their breath so that the others could hear. And at night the whisper went up and down the tent: ‘Never, never, never’. Never would they turn their backs on their comrades. Never would they turn their backs on their communist ideals. Never would they sign the dílosi.
Within a few days, Themis had grasped the layout of Makronisos. There were separate zones, one for those who had not repented, one for those who were on their way to ‘rehabilitation’ and a third for those who had signed the dílosi.
Alpha, Beta, Gamma were the names of the zones. A, B, C. One, two, three. They were told that these were also the simple steps they must take to cleanse themselves, to be reborn.
In a state of weariness, Themis followed the flow of the day. Along with the thousands of other prisoners everything was done in timed shifts including the daily visits to the cold, charmless cathedral, which had been quickly built out of concrete in the centre of the island.
‘They expect us to pray?’ muttered one of Themis’ group. ‘I will pray for the death of our guards. That’s all I will pray for.’
She was overheard by one of the guards and Themis never saw her again.
A subtler form of torture was the relentless noise. Not only were there constant announcements over the Tannoy, orders barked in their faces and the screams of the tortured, but on some days music blared from the loudspeakers without interruption. Nationalist songs, military bands and snatches of orchestral music were played over and over again.
One of the women who slept close to Themis was taken one night and buried up to her neck in the sand outside. The following morning they all had to file past her. It was a form of torture designed to terrorise them all.
After that the woman lost her sanity. All the humiliation and physical abuse to which she had been subjected did not seem to have affected her as much as the relentless blast of music. She stood up one night and began to scream, her hands clamped over her ears.
‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’
Her shrieks attracted the guards who came into the tent and pulled her out. Such a protest gave them the perfect excuse to punish her again.
For the first time, Themis realised that all music needed silence to have meaning. Without pause it was simply noise.
A few days later, for no apparent reason, the music stopped. The unpredictability of the decision was almost equally nerve-racking, giving no reassurance that this particular torment might not recommence any time.
Every so often, the prisoners were handed a copy of the island’s magazine, celebrating the signing of repentances, reporting on government army activities and showing photographs of Queen Frederika on a tour of the children’s homes she had opened. Her sunny, well-fed demeanour beamed out from the page, making Themis’ temperature rise in spite of the cold. The woman seemed well-meaning, but Themis could not forgive her for so blatantly supporting the right.
Sometimes, when their guards and torturers wanted time off for themselves, the women were encouraged to do some needlework.
‘Womanly handicrafts, that’s what we do while they take a break,’ muttered one of the longer-term ‘inmates’ sarcastically to Themis.
Sewing had been a passion of her sister’s but Themis had always been averse to it and everything it seemed to represent. Reluctantly, she selected a square of the discoloured linen from a pile, threaded her needle with cotton and sat down on the stony ground outside the tent. She chose red.
Nobody was shouting, no one was bullying, there was just the noise of the wind as it rattled the branches in some twisted trees.
Fifty women sat in silence. The woman next to Themis had a cloth spread across her lap. It was edged with a pleasing symmetrical pattern like a row of zigzags.
‘Look,’ whispered its owner, orienting the cloth so that Themis could see it from another angle.
Themis was impressed. Now she could see that the pattern comprised an acronym repeated all the way round the outside. ELASELASELASELAS.
‘And in the middle, I will also sew the name of our motherland, ELLAS. But I’ll spell it wrong there too . . .’
The girl, who was much younger than Themis, smiled mis-chievously.
Embroidering the initials of the communist resistance army, ELAS, for whom the girl’s three brothers had died, was one of the many small rebellions taking place around her. In the guise of traditional island patterns, Themis saw birds in flight and ships in full sail. ‘They represent our freedom,’ explained one woman. Such acts of subversion achieved little but kept their spirits from dying.
Themis sat for some time, staring at the white square on her lap. In theory the subject for their embroidery must be something that celebrated the motherland. She loved her patrída as vehemently as the guards who kept her here and she was determined to show it.
Having knotted the thread, she pierced the fabric from the underside, and to her great satisfaction saw the point of the needle appear right at the very centre, exactly where she wanted it. From here, she began to embroider the outline of a heart. She could say it represented her love for Greece and for her family but with every stitch she would think of Tasos. She had felt so complete in the mountains with him and wondered if that’s what Plato had meant when he talked of the Other Half. She certainly felt she had been cut in two. Her dream of being reunited with the man she loved at least gave her hope for something, and each time the point of the needle pierced the cloth and she pulled the scarlet thread through, she imagined herself pulling him closer.
For the first time, she understood the pleasure of sewing. The concentration took her mind away from her situation, and the small size of her hands, which had sometimes been a disadvantage when handling a gun, was now a benefit.
As the months passed, the days grew longer and hotter. Themis was becoming progressively more exhausted by the days of hard labour and was often beaten for slacking. Needlework was the only activity for which she had energy. One of the women was lamenting that her periods had ceased, making it only two of the fifty women in the tent who still menstruated. Some were relieved to find themselves spared the monthly curse, but others feared that it would never return. Themis remembered how Fotini’s periods had stopped and malnutrition had long since done the same to her.
All day, she felt the sun beating down on her neck and at night lay on her bed in a delirium of nausea and discomfort. She could not sleep. It was then that she heard screams. They were not the screams of a woman, but of a man. A high-pitched squeal such as a wounded animal might make. Torture on the island had intensified. The government authorities were not satisfied by the number of dílosis being signed on Makronisos and had demanded an improvement in results.
One night, without warning, three guards came into their tent and dragged one of the women away. They did not take her far. The guards wanted the others to hear everything so that they could imagine what was being done to their victim.
Her screams traumatised Themis and when, an hour later, the woman was roughly pushed back into the tent, she was almost too nervous to look.
Whimpering, the woman fell to the ground and for a moment lay still, naked and curled into a foetal position. Three others quickly gathered around her and one began tearing up a sheet getting ready to bathe her wounds.
‘Theé kai kýrie! Look at her feet!’ Themis heard one of them saying. ‘They’ve destroyed them.’
That day the woman lay motionless on her thin mat, a reminder to all the others of their potential fate. The following night there was another victim and on each subsequent night another. Rape was common, but some returned without fingernails and others were beaten with socks full of stones or had cigarette burns on their breasts. Each one was evidence of what happened if you refused to sign the dílosi.
No one could ever predict the precise time when the flap of the tent would be flung open and the next victim randomly chosen. Themis remembered how she used to feign sleep to try to make herself invisible to Margarita and the night that the sound of heavy army boots stopped next to her bed, she squeezed her eyes tight shut, hoping, praying, willing it not to be her turn.
Resistance to violence of any kind was pointless. She slipped her feet into her boots and walked calmly between the two guards, trying to breathe, telling herself to be brave. So often she had rehearsed how she would react when her time came. She would try to think of the sweetest things she knew, of Tasos, of his lips, of her unfinished heart.
A few metres from the exit, one of the soldiers put his hands on her shoulders. He spoke quietly, his face so close to hers that their lips could almost have touched. It was intimate. She felt violated even before anything had taken place.
‘You can save yourself,’ he said. The soldier was not much older than her, but his teeth were rotten and black and his breath smelled like excrement. She almost gagged with revulsion.
‘If you want, you can save yourself,’ he murmured again.
Themis said nothing. Clearly her silence annoyed him.
‘Tell me that you don’t wish to die. Tell me that you will sign,’ he said, so quietly but so close she could feel his hot breath on her lips.
‘Say that you will sign!’ screamed the second guard, leaning in to intimidate her further. ‘Just sign! Then our work is done.’
Themis contemplated the idea just for a moment. It would mean a return in shame to Athens, to face Thanasis (perhaps even Margarita, who knew?). It would be a denial of all her beliefs, a betrayal of so many people she had fought with. There would be the reading out of her ‘dílosi metanoías’, the statement of repentance, in the same church where she had understood charmolýpi for the first time. The public humiliation of the pointing finger, the scornful glance, the gloating of neighbours whom she knew to have been collaborators. No, it was a form of suicide, the abnegation of her ‘self’. How would she ever face Tasos or Panos when she saw them again?
All of this filled her with greater fear than the soldiers who intimidated her now. She must stay strong. The nicotine on the soldier’s breath filled her mouth and bile rose up from the pit of her belly. Suddenly she was heaving and vomiting, and the two soldiers were turning away in disgust. She crouched down on the ground and wretched until her stomach was dry.
‘Get the bitch up,’ one soldier ordered the other.
Themis was pulled to her feet and whipped several times across her back. Before roughly pushing her back into the tent, one of the soldiers sadistically twisted her arms behind her back until she thought they would come out of their sockets.
Guiltily she watched as they pulled another woman from her bed and then listened in terror to the screams that came from outside. The woman was being raped, and Themis knew it could have been her.
Eventually Themis’ ‘substitute’ was dragged back, unconscious, and dropped unceremoniously on to her bed. Several of the other women tended to her as she came round, screaming in pain from the cigarette burns that covered her face and neck. They dabbed gently but uselessly at the wounds but when morning came it was clear that the scars would disfigure her for ever.
The soldiers were finding the strength of the female will to be greater than their determination to make them sign and their frustration only made them crueller.
For several weeks, no one in Themis’ tent had signed. It gave them a reputation, and the soldiers adopted new tactics. Punishment was no longer a terror saved for the night and they were often subjected to daytime beatings. Themis’ skin was sun-darkened but there were many patches further blackened by bruising. To try to break them, the guards picked people out for solitary confinement. Themis was one such victim and she endured three days and nights shut in a damp and lightless cave. Bread was thrown in once a day but with no way of calculating the passage of time, she often ate it too quickly and then had nothing. These were the hours of her deepest misery and despair.
One day, when it seemed only moments since they had gone to bed, they were woken by shouts.
‘Get up, you stubborn whores. Outside. Now.’
The sun had not risen and the stars were still visible as they stumbled into the early morning. Though it was April, there was still a chill in the early morning and their thin clothes were no protection against the elements.
This was something new. They were used to sudden awakening and bullying at all times of day, but now they were being marched at speed towards an unfamiliar part of the island, far from the tented areas to a place where no one would hear or see what they were subjected to.
After a forty-minute hike, they reached an area of scrubland. The sun had risen and Themis looked around her and up at the blue sky. Nothing had yet happened.
They were all standing in a huddle and the soldier in charge directed them to stand apart.
‘Like this!’ he said, demonstrating what he wanted them to do. ‘Arms out!’
When the women did not respond, he shouted: ‘Aeroplane!’
They were all obliged to stand in the same ludicrous position. They were being tortured for their beliefs on an invisible cross.
After a while, numbness set in and Themis experienced a temporary loss of pain. Other women had fallen to the ground, fainting from the unseasonal heat and exhaustion. When they came round, they had to resume the position. A few of them sobbed, but their crying was without weeping. Dehydration had robbed them of their tears. Nothing moistened their eyes or their throats.
They stood like this, with the sun soaring higher and higher into the sky and, when most of the women had dropped to the ground, the verbal bullying began once again. The soldier screamed to be heard above the buzzing of a thousand flies that swarmed over the carcass of an animal rotting nearby.
‘You can stand, each day, for a week, a month, a year, like this,’ he said, smirking. ‘We don’t mind. We’re happy for you to expand our air force.’
He paused for a moment to acknowledge the titters of appreciation from other soldiers standing around and, pleased with his attempt at humour, he was encouraged to continue.
‘The Americans have given us a helping hand but we could always do with some reinforcements.’
All the soldiers were laughing and jeering now.
The position the women were obliged to adopt was calculated to make them look ridiculous, but it was to their bodies and spirits that the real damage had been done. Several lay still in the dust and those who had any strength helped the fallen. Very slowly, when they were allowed, they all staggered back to the camp. There was no natural water supply on Makronisos and when one of the women noticed a trough left for the goats, she ran towards it, dropped to her knees, and plunged her face into the fetid, tepid water. Themis followed and drank thirstily, scooping the water into her mouth as if it was the sweetest wine. All the others waited patiently for their turn and the soldiers did not intervene. They stood at a distance, smoking and chatting to each other as if their job was done.
Even now, no one in the group had signed the dílosi and the guards took it as a personal failing that the women continued to resist. It would be a triumph if even one of them gave in. The guards’ strategy was simple. That night and for several days they were not fed.
Everyone in the tent was now sick. Many had dysentery, four were taken from the island with suspected tuberculosis and several had developed sepsis from untreated sores. The soldiers were sadistic but they did not want to risk their own health and for a while left the women to die or to recover.
Themis was in a state of delirium for several days following the hours of intense humiliation in the sun. Nevertheless, she was forced outside and pushed with a rifle between her shoulder blades to the daily parade.
‘If you can walk, you can attend,’ said the soldier, jabbing his gun into her spine.
She almost fainted on the path to the theatre but was held up by two solicitous women, one on either side. It was only with their kindness that she got there and once they had gently lowered her into one of the stone seats they moved away. Such kind deeds could be punished.
The dust was stirred up that evening by a strong wind and Themis looked downwards to prevent it from going into her eyes. Even so, the grit seemed to burrow its way beneath her lashes.
She heard the beat of soldiers’ feet on the stony ground and, peering through half-open eyes, she saw the dim outline of men filing past. These were the soldiers who the previous day had signed the dílosi. It was a triumph for those in charge of them. Ten all at once.
God knows what they were subjected to, thought Themis. They were being fêted with almost religious fervour.
A priest stood with a line of officers. He was chanting.
‘It’s like a baptism,’ said one of the other women under her breath.
‘They’re being rebaptised,’ said another. ‘Reborn. Purified.’
Themis closed her eyes. It disturbed her to imagine how these good communist soldiers had compromised themselves, but worse still was to witness the gloating of those who had bullied them into it. These soldiers, who had signed dílosis themselves, now led the celebration for the latest ‘conversions’. Their leader was preparing to speak.
‘Think what they’ll get back home,’ said her neighbour.
‘A good meal,’ replied her other neighbour, talking across Themis, ‘and a warm shower, and a comfortable bed, and clean clothes and . . .’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said the first firmly. ‘They’ll find scorn. Derision.’
It was true that the repenters would face humiliation from those on both sides when their declarations were made public. Nevertheless, Themis suddenly felt a pang of envy that they would soon be home and away from this hell. For a moment she was lost in reverie.
Then she heard a voice. Just four words were enough for her to recognise the cultured intonation.
‘You have saved yourselves.’
She knew the timbre of that educated accent so well, the way certain words were emphasised.
‘You have changed your path,’ he continued. ‘You are redeemed, to live once again as full citizens of Greece.’
Tasos? Was it really him? She had heard that heat stroke could give you delusions and, with the setting sun behind him, Themis could see only a silhouette. She desperately wanted to be wrong.
The sun went down rapidly now and as it did his image became clearer. She blinked with disbelief. It really was Tasos, standing there with a mocking smile. It was many months since she had seen him and although, in that time, many of the women around her had changed beyond recognition, he seemed not to have altered by even one curl.
Themis’ heart was beating hard, the shock all the greater given that he must have been the chief protagonist in obtaining dílosis from the men that stood before him.
Drowning in a confusion of passion and rationality, she called out his name.
‘Tasos . . . Tasos!’
Nobody, including Makris, responded. On Makronisos everyone knew him as Makris and the new ‘converts’ and all the guards turned to look at her. It was audacious behaviour to draw attention to yourself in this way.
The women on either side of Themis urged her to be quiet.
Everyone was looking at her, except for the man she loved. He carried on with his speech, apparently oblivious.
‘And now, before you leave this place, it is your duty to make your fellow Greeks see the light, as you have done. Your mission now is to save as you have been saved.’
There were murmurs of discontent. These men had been expecting immediate liberation but this was not to be.
Makris spoke with quasi-religious zeal but his audience was now distracted by Themis, who had called out again. As soon as he finished, the guards marshalled the new converts and got them out of the theatre, to vacate it for the next part of the parade. Only then did Makris have a clear line of sight towards Themis. He turned his gaze on her.
Themis met his eyes with her own and saw nothing but a vacuum of non-recognition. The face was the same but there was nothing in his expression to suggest that she was anything other than a stranger.
The same fathomless eyes that she had loved so much now filled her with fear. They were as dark as hell, as cold and empty as the cave where she had been sent for solitary confinement. She could do nothing but watch with disillusion and grief as the man she loved turned away. Something had been stripped out of him and, as she stared at his retreating back, she felt something had been torn from her too.
Everyone was looking at her now. A few of the guards were laughing and pointing. The women around Themis looked embarrassed for her, but angry too. This loss of control would undoubtedly have repercussions, possibly for all of them.