The Angry Hills - Leon Uris [43]
“Where is Eleftheria?” he asked.
“She went back to Dernica.”
“What do you mean she went back to Dernica? Did you send her?”
“She went back. What difference does it make why she went? She went.”
“It makes a lot of difference to me!”
“Finish your coffee. It will get cold.”
“But...”
“Don’t get excited. She promises to return on the Sabbath.”
Before Mike could argue further, Barba-Leonidas walked out toward the fields. He turned to Despo, who remained as silent as a dumb woman.
Mike grunted angrily. Whose work was this? Was Eleftheria trying to trap him and keep him in this remote place or did the giant send her away for some reason? He didn’t like it at all, but there was little choice except to ride it out till the Sabbath and see. He finished his coffee.
Barba-Leonidas was astounded when he looked up from his work in the field and saw Mike standing over him.
“Anything I can do?” Mike asked.
“Bah!” the giant roared in his normal voice. “Go pick grapes with my old woman. I have to clear rocks and I would not want my Englezos friend to soil his tender hands.” Mike accepted the challenge and went to work beside him. Barba-Leonidas’s fine broad face was a smile from ear to ear.
Yes, Kaloghriani was the end of the world. It was as far removed from civilization as the moon. Mike worked shoulder to shoulder with his host but found it difficult to keep up with the human bear even though he was thirty years younger. They sweated together in the fields during the day and at night they got drunk together. In just three days the bond between them became irrevocable.
Barba-Leonidas found it great sport to tease Mike as the frail little Englezos fellow. Mike was hardly a small man and once was considered a pretty good football player at Cal. They would sneak up on one another and throw wrestling holds. Mike managed to hold his own for a short time—until Leonidas got weary of playing. He would then lift Mike above his head, balance him with one hand and casually flip him into the nearest brush and they would both roar with laughter. Mike often thought of what Cal’s team would have been like with seven men like Leonidas on the line. Although he worked hard and drank hard, Mike had never before had the wonderful, joyous feeling of just being alive as he did in his first few days in Kaloghriani.
Despo, the wrinkled old specimen in her drab black homespun and her one tooth hanging lonesomely from her upper gum, was never at rest. Her prune-skinned hands were in constant motion—alongside her husband in the fields, endless housework, gardening the vegetable plot, tending chickens, churning, searching firewood, spinning thread and weaving cloth. She was at work many hours before the sun rose until many hours after it set.
Each day after working the stony, unfertile land the two men would trudge in to the coffee house. There was no song here. Weary men gathered to sit and drink ouzo until the simple meal of bread and lentils was ready at home. There were none of the luxuries here that were found in Paleachora.
Yet here, too, Mike found the quality of generosity. As remote as Kaloghriani was, it was not too remote for hungry men to find. Now and then a stray from the desperate cities would show up in search of food. No man left the village without some wheat, either sold at a fair price or simply given away. On the Sabbath Barba-Leonidas and the other men of the village hunted rabbits to feed those who might venture in. There was none of the venality here that was making other farmers rich. The philosophy was simple. If there are two grains of wheat, one should be shared.
And Michael Morrison learned the legend of the place, a legend as ancient as its hills. He was in “the Village of Thieves...”
For centuries they had tried to scratch a living from the unyielding land and a boy of Kaloghriani growing into manhood learned it was far easier to exist by looting neighboring villages. So, over the years, the men