4 Just below the Makriyiánni district near the Acropolis. Eléni and I moved in there. I met an old girlfriend of mine there. I’d stayed at their house in Neápolis. As a student. Beautiful girl, like a statue. She was going out with a district attorney at the time. She told me all about him. But she preferred me. She was older than me. I ran into her in Ilisós. Pópi? I say to her. I’m living here with my mother, she tells me. She had a sister. She was living with someone, an old man, he was supporting her. I don’t know if he married her. Pópi was down in the dumps. What’s the matter? I say to her. Come to my house, she tells me. They were running a gambling racket there. Pópi was one of a group of professional mourners. Which meant that KOBA5 would send for her now and then and she would go to the cathedral and writhe and swear and wail. The December Uprising came to an end. The official state was reduced to the Palaiá Anáktora.6 And to Goudí.7 To Goudí and the Makriyiánni district. Kapetán Achilléas was in Athens. Achilléas, the head of OPLA. He blew up all those buildings. He’d come there as a mechanic, and he blew them up. But our most upsetting meeting took place later on. By the end of Christmas the ELAS rebels had pretty much cleared out of Athens. That’s when I went and enlisted. Voluntarily. I still had some time left to serve, from when I was a student. The National Militia was there. It had been agreed at the Liberation to organize certain similar battalions. Manned by Reserve officers, for the most part. I went and enlisted. My thinking was that the sooner I got that obligation over with the better. My thinking was correct. And on top of all that of course there was the problem of survival. The Germans left, the December Uprising came to an end. I had been living off various relatives. So I went and enlisted. I owed that time. But that’s what always happens. Where will you get food, where will you sleep? In the barracks. Wherever they give you food. That was the beginning of the enlistments. On both sides. That was one reason to enlist. And the other was safety. In the mountains no one came after you. You went around, you ate, you drank, you got laid. Otherwise you were a reactionary, and you were hounded. You ended up in the Battalions. You found a place to lay your head. I went and enlisted. It was now 1946. The plebiscite was held in September. Shortly afterward I completed my nine months, and I was discharged. I went down to Trípolis. I stayed with my sisters, they were there, they had opened an atelier. I had my law degree, but I had no license yet. I wasn’t licensed to practice. The Civil War began. That’s when it started. In Litóchoro. And Pontokerasiá. They brought the gendarmes down from Ayios Pétros in their undershorts. They butchered them in their sleep. The revenge killings began. Terrible business. So the KKE could gather its men, all the ones who had run away to Athens, they set up the local guard units. A unit in every prefecture. It was there in the local unit in Arcadia that they captured them all. Velissáris, Kraterós, Broúsalis, Delivoriás. Someone named Dimópoulos. Seventeen or eighteen people. They took them down to Trípolis. A court-martial was held in Trípolis. With Zisiádis as the main witness for the prosecution. Achilléas Zisiádis. Had he changed sides? Had he sold out? It must have been one or the other. And someone named Bouziánis also. Pávlos Bouziánis. In the same line of work. Achilléas Zisiádis, high-rise building construction in the 1960s. An engineer. Offices in Pangráti, in Kypséli, and on Syngroú Avenue, in Athens. The trial went on for days. I would go and watch. Kouráfas was there. One of the accused. When he saw me he became all flustered. Kóstas Pappás. They executed him. Velissáris was there. Kraterós Aryiríou was there. Mítsos Kapetanéas came to Trípolis. He tells me, let’s get Yiánnis off. How can we get him off? Go and talk to him. One of the military judges, Alfayiánnis, was from Astros. Mítsos knew him, they were related. Mítsos, an avowed old bachelor, had married a cousin of his, late in life. Nelly. She’s still living. No children. He secured me a permit, I went to see Yiánnis. In the basement of the courthouse. Yiánnis, come on, don’t die for nothing. They’re going to kill me, Márkos. During his testimony they asked him if he disapproved and all that. He didn’t even answer. That trial took place in 1948. In the month of February. Delivoriás and Broúsalis got off. Both of them. They agreed to sign. The whole of Arcadia was mobilized. Priests, bishops. A big thing. They had signed renunciations. But other people also signed and they weren’t saved. Diódoros and I would go listen to their defense pleas. And Diódoros would jeer at the ones who signed. In February 1948. Which of them didn’t sign: Kraterós Aryiríou. He shook his head. He didn’t say a word. Yiánnis Velissáris. The same. He wouldn’t talk. Polývios Isariótis. The Iliópoulos brothers. They all refused. Oh yes, and Kóstas Pappás, the Post Office employee, otherwise known as Yiánnis Kouráfas.