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that held my mother’s bones. She was frozen in my memory as I had known her from the perspective of a child; a source of unfailing strength, security and love. But in delving into the events of her last years, I had begun to glimpse a more complex and ambiguous person, a troubled peasant woman who tried to live by the rules of the primitive mountain culture that constituted her world, and when they failed her, defied them.
    My mother had scarcely gone to school; she put on the kerchief at the age of eleven like every other village girl, and from that moment never dared to speak to a man until the day she was handed over as a bride to a husband she didn’t know. The politics that shattered her universe during the last decade of her life made no sense to her. She never traveled farther than the provincial capital. Her husband lived half a world away in a country that she longed to see but knew nothing about, although she was branded, because of her marriage, with the name “the Amerikana” and all the prejudices that came with it.
    My mother’s world was ruled by magic, superstition, ghosts and devils to be invoked or appeased by holy oil and charms, but these were not enough to save her and her children from the war that swept into their mountains. When she saw that living by the strict village canons was not enough, when it became a choice between losing her children or her life, she discovered a strength that I now know is given to few.
    Before my search was over I had to find my mother, to see her with the eyes of an adult, and to uncover her secret feelings about the world that caged her. I had to do this in order to learn how she wanted me to deal with her murderers. I had to communicate with her across the chasm of death to discover if, as she climbed toward that ravine to her execution, she was Antigone, meeting death with resignation because she had purposely defied a human command to honor a higher law of the heart, or if she was Hecuba, crying out for vengeance. What did she want me to do?
    Interrupting my reflections, over the priest’s singsong and the chanter’s responses, rose a mechanical roar that I had never heard as a boy. It came from above, in the direction of my house. I started up the path leading from the churchyard.
    I found the house a complete ruin, overgrown with ivy, deserted except for lizards; the roof and floor collapsing into the cellar. I discovered the source of the noise: it was a bulldozer at work, extending a horizontal path for a road across the lower boundary of what had been our garden. The low stone wall around the property had disappeared and the remaining walls of the house stared with empty eye sockets at the monster shaving awayanother great swath of red soil, perilously close to the lone mulberry tree that had been our landmark.
    Although the house was a grim monument to the killings that had taken place there, I realized that I wanted that mulberry tree to survive. I motioned to the bulldozer operator to stop and then went over and asked him to cut around the tree, that piece of my childhood.
    As the machine set to work again, I walked over to the house, looking down for the first time into the exposed cellar where my mother and so many others had spent their last hours.
    The mulberry tree and all the pleasant memories clinging to its branches made me understand that my search would give me as much joy as sorrow. This was the house where Eleni Gatzoyiannis suffered and died, but it was also the house where she was brought as a nineteen-year-old bride, where my sisters and I were born, where we played and fought. The terrace was still there, where my mother would bring her hand-turned sewing machine outside on warm evenings to take advantage of the breeze and look up occasionally from her work to gaze at the valley stretching away below her. We were hungry there but we were happy, too, and our memories would outlast the house. “We have eaten bread and salt together,” the