Are You Sure...

"Here, put these on, but take them off as soon as you reach the back of the house. Then let your eyes get used to the darkness."

These were night vision goggles. They worked well, although everything seemed a bit greeny-yellowy and swimmy around the outlines. We moved almost silently down the narrow, steep paths to the narrow street between the houses and the ruins above. We had almost reached our positions when a solitary dog began to whine, and then bark a warning.

As Sheila had predicted, all its vigilance earned it was some muffled curses from within the house, and eventually the barking subsided into low growls. I reached the back of the third house along, identified the low doorway, and removed the night goggles.

The night was black and bright with stars. I had never seen them so bright and beautiful in the absence of the urban light pollution I was used to. I drew out the black tube of the baton, found the closed butt end and clutched it loosely in the palm of my hand. fingers around the business end, and waited. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, and I thought I could hear the hissing of my blood coursing through the capillaries in my ears.

I heard a loud noise from the front of the house as Sheila kicked the door open. There were cries and shouts and a child began to scream piercingly loud. Suddenly the door in front of me flew upon and I saw the dim figure of a man dressed only in a shirt. The bushy black beard and long, lank hair identified him as Leni's cousin Leftheris.

Without hesitation I extended the baton with a sharp swish, and struck him hard on the right shoulder, He howled with pain and dropped to his knees. I put out my foot and pushed him onto his back. He lay there groaning. I gesticulated with the baton, and he stayed discreetly silent.

A minute later Sheila came to the back door with her maglite, and stooped over Leftheri. She took a plastic tie from a capacious leg pocket and secured his hands, then slapped a piece of silver tape across his mouth. I followed her into the house, and looked around in the dim light.

A grotesque sight awaited me. Three figures lay on the dirt floor. The man was Takis. He was unconscious and looked as if he had a dislocated shoulder. His thumbs were tied together with a plastic restraint clearly made for the job.

The other figures were women. They were almost naked from the armpits down, but their heads and arms were secured in tight bundles, as their nightdresses had been used as straightjackets. They kicked their bare legs and moaned.

The older woman was clad in long, grubby drawers down to the knees. Her torso was naked with sparse hair at armpits. She was probably only in her forties but she looked twenty or thirty years older, spindle-shanked with withered belly and breasts.

The younger one was completely naked from the armpits down. She was fat and flabby with drooping, pendulous blue-veined breasts and thick scuts of coarse black hair at her armpits and crotch. Leni was kicking her vigorously, with her bare feet. She was getting in the occasional hard blow, but it was clear that her own anger was undermining her efforts. She was screaming at the woman in Greek in a hysterical rage until I took her in my arms, and hugged her.

"Leni, it's Kirk. Do you want to come with us. We have to go quickly and quietly. Don't dress, just find some shoes to put on."

Leni was still kicking at the bundled nightdress that hid the head and arms of her cousin's wife. The idea of shoes obviously had some appeal.

"That bastard Takis raped me over an' over and that fat cunt Yotta helped him. She held me when he was beating me, and encouraged him to hit me harder. The last time she thought it a huge joke to stuff a shitty diaper in my mouth as I was being raped. I want to kill the evil cow."

"We are not going to kill anyone. Get a grip on yourself. Tell Yotta that if anyone comes after us, we will come back and kill the lot of them. Make sure she understands. Tell her that if anyone follows us down to Panagia Thespina, they will pay for it."

Sheila had been standing listening to every word. Suddenly she grabbed Takis, who was beginning to stir, and with a single heave she dragged him to his feet.

"I'll deal with this bastard."

She frogmarched him out of the front door of the cottage and kicked him over the ten-foot drop top the terrace below. His fall was checked, but not stopped by a pomegranate bush, and the shock of the long thorns tearing at his flesh brought him back to full consciousness for a moment or two. As he continued to roll, his head hit a boulder with a loud crack and he was still and silent.

Looking back into the darkness of the house I could see Leni crouched down by Yotta, pouring out a torrent of angry Greek. Sheila and I drew on our night goggles and I picked up Leni and threw her over my shoulder. We stepped over a groaning Leftheris, and started the ascent.

My years of intensive work on my upper body strength paid off at last. Carrying Leni in a fireman's lift seemed no effort at all and I could stride up the goat tracks with ease. Sheila stopped frequently to look behind us, but there was no sign of pursuit. Even if they tried to follow us, they would almost certainly go downhill towards the town on the other side of the bridge.

A couple of hundred years of steep climb took us to the abandoned house where we planned to stop the three hours or so until dawn. Inside the building, I pulled some clothes from my rucksack for Leni, and she stripped off her nightdress and put on a bra, panties, jeans and a sweater.

Suddenly we all realised that we were hungry, and we gorged on fruit bars until our sugar levels returned to something like normal. Sheila dug out three cans of Nestea from the bottom of her rucksack and we drank. Now it was time for Leni to tell her story.

"Well, you know I inherited sixty stremmata of land from my mother - it was her prika. My cousins wanted that land, and I rented it to them for a couple of cans of oil a year to go to my aunt. That was fine up 'til now, but things have changed. The Demos has been planning a road across the top, and now with all the E. U. money, they can make it happen.

"My uncle has political connections with Golden Dawn, and they owe him. If he let out some of the stories about the past of some of these people they could never see daylight again, let alone taste power. Anyway, one of his political connections showed Taki a plan of the new road, and it skirts my land, so suddenly a bit of land worth thirty kilos of oil a year becomes worth half a million euros. Build three or four houses on it and it could be worth over a million.

"I was promised to Takis by my parents, but I always hated him and his brother. The family tried to force me to marry him - even got a Pappas to the house at midnight to conduct the marriage. I screamed and struggled so much that the Pappas refused to conduct the marriage. That's when I ran away to my uncle and aunt in Winnipeg.

"Then we met that day in the library, and I was soon head over heels in love with you. We moved in together and a few months later we decided to get married. I asked my family to the wedding, and Takis and Leftheris came; you remember? That's how they knew where to find me.

"I was happy for the first time in my life. I never wanted to visit Greece or speak Greek ever again in my life.

"You remember, I had the day off work and I was painting the cupboards. The doorbell rang and it was Takis and Leftheris. I was never so scared in my life. Takis took one step into the apartment and hit me so hard in the stomach that I couldn't breathe for several minutes. I just lay there gasping for breath. He stood over me and put one foot on each of my hands and held me immobile.

He said,

"Tell your brand new husband that you have found someone else, and you are leaving him. Don't say anything else. When he gets home tonight, call me on your cell phone and leave the line open. I shall hear every word you say.

"Get this wrong, even in the slightest, and I shall kill him and Leftheri will kill Dimitri and Poppy. Believe me it would be a pleasure. Meet us at the Bus station at seven tonight. Be there. You know what will happen if you try to play me for a fool."

"So I did what he said. He brought me here and a really evil man, an Australian Greek Pappas, came to the house and married us. I told him I was married already and he said that I was only married in an apostate ceremony; now I was truly married in an Orthodox ceremony. He stood there while the three of them, Takis, Leftheris and Yotta punched and kicked me and pulled my hair out until I gave in. God how I hate them all.

"The only thing I refused to do was to sign the land over to them. I thought that if I did that, then they would have no need to keep me alive any longer. For a while I thought you might come and find me, but I gave up hope months ago."

*****

That was six months ago. Now Leni has been treated for her injuries, the broken ribs and crushed fingers are healed, and her broken nose was re-broken and re-set. The burns on her neck and breasts have slowly healed, leaving little silvery discs of scar tissue. We try and try to put it all behind us, but I see sometimes the light go out of her eyes, and she slumps down in a pitiable state I can do nothing about. I hear her weeping at night, and try to hug her, but she pushes me away. I am sure that, in her mind, I failed her. And I admit, that if it had not been for that Christmas conversation she would probably be dead by now.

Last time I spoke to Sheila on the phone, she wondered aloud just what Leni had said to Yotta in Greek that night.

Is it all over even now?

This is the first of two stories set in Greece. Both deal with abduction and forced marriage, but in very different ways. I hope you will be encourages to try the second one, called "Aphrodite's Island."