The Angry Hills - Leon Uris [44]
The village elder, a ninety-nine-year-old named Petros, had spent forty of his years behind bars. Barba-Leonidas bashfully admitted to a few five-year stretches in his younger days—before he mastered his art. The crime was not the stealing but the getting caught. But once caught, a man gained stature in the community by the number of years he spent in prison. And to achieve Averof Prison in Athens—that was the supreme accomplishment. Even Father Gregorios, the priest and only literate person in Kaloghriani, was very vague about ten years he had spent in Canada.
This fantastic breed of hill men must surely have been descendants of the ancient Greek gods, for Barba-Leonidas was a small man among them. Several towered to seven feet and over in height and they lived to be eighty and ninety without a trace of serious illness.
Mike would see them shoot a running rabbit at four hundred yards. Although he was able to work alongside the sixty-five-year-old Barba-Leonidas, he made the sad mistake of trying to outhike him on the day before the Sabbath. The men of Kaloghriani could walk the clock around at a never slackening pace and they could walk uphill as fast as they did downhill, without so much as drawing a deep breath.
The women labored from dusk to dark and were as fiercely rugged as their men, but their beauty faded early. When a child was born, only a few moments after the mother left off working in the field, there was no celebration, no joy. For all things in Kaloghriani—life, death, marriage, disaster—came only as part of another day of work as the Lord doled it out. There was too much to be done for survival to indulge in song or dance or tears.
And so, at the end of the fifth day of Mike’s stay, Barba-Leonidas announced in a very matter of fact way that Mike was his son. “My other son was killed” (a matter of little concern, for life went on) “and God has brought me another.”
There was little Mike could do to dissuade him from this simple logic.
“Bah! If the Allies are winning the war, why do they retreat? Answer that! Why do they retreat? You are stupid, you stupid Englezos.”
“Now don’t forget, most of the free world is not yet in the war.”
“Bah! If you win, you go forward—if you lose you go backward. The Allies go backward, they lose!”
“Try to get it through your thick skull, Leonidas, the farther the Germans extend their battle fronts the more difficult they become to supply, and the thinner they spread their forces. Look at Napoleon’s march on Moscow, for example, in 1812.”
“I say, bah! bah! bah! You talk like a woman. If I fight for Kaloghriani and leave it and run to Dadi, I lose—yes or no—yes or no!”
“Aw, for Christ’s sake, Leonidas—pour me another glass.”
The Sabbath came. Mike awoke early and anxiously awaited the arrival of Eleftheria. By mid-morning his anxiety changed to suspicion. Barba-Leonidas became strangely silent. All during the week he had noticed annoyance every time he mentioned the girl to Leonidas. By afternoon he knew full well that one of two things had happened. Eleftheria was going to see that he stayed in Kaloghriani or Barba-Leonidas was going to see to it.
In the early afternoon Mike had reached the breaking point and demanded to know what was going on. Barba-Leonidas, who could not lie with a straight face, refused to answer. He selected a rifle and stomped from the cottage, announcing that he was going rabbit hunting.
Mike turned to Despo. The aged, wrinkled woman looked up sheepishly from her weaving.
“Eleftheria—where is she?”
Despo shook her head.
“Where is she, dammit!”
Mike stood over her. “Dammit! Tell me where she is!”
“She was here!” Despo cried. “She was here in midweek. You were in the fields. Barba-Leonidas sent her away.”
“Why?”
“Because you are his son and you can never leave.”
EIGHT