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Greeks say, meaning that we have shared the most elemental foods, suffered the same hardships, known the same joys, and that nothing can ever break that bond that ties us together, not even death.
    I would have to rebuild this house, stone by stone, in my imagination, before I could face Katis and the others. I would have to re-create her lost village—a mysterious world as faded now as a tapestry from the Middle Ages, with only a face visible here, an arm there. When I had re-made it, weaving it from the memories of scores of different witnesses, then I would have reached the end of my search for my mother. I would understand what it was that she wanted me to know as she left our gate for the last time to climb to the ravine.
    The witnesses to my mother’s fate were a generation of leaves scattered by winds of war all over the world—Canada, the United States, England, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and every corner of Greece. I had to track them down and use all my professional skill to get the truth from them.
    In the course of the journey I would find not only my mother but myself. By re-creating the last decade of her life, I would learn how much I had been formed by that now-dead world. Whatever I decided I must do to my mother’s killers, was I capable of it? Others in my place were unable to find the will to claim vengeance. Did I have that will?
    When I had uncovered the answer, which lay buried somewhere in the ruins of my house and my childhood, then I would be ready to confront Katis and the rest. But my search had to begin with the discovery of a dead woman and the child who walked out of this mountain over three decades ago. I had to find the story not only of my mother’s death, but of her life as well. And to do that I had to go back to the autumn of 1940.



In the mountain villages of northern Greece, life moves to the slow rhythm of the seasons, punctuated now and then by the feast days of the saints. October culminates in the feast of St. Demetrios, which marks the end of summer, when the fattened goats and sheep are brought down from the mountain pastures and shut up in the basements under the stone houses for the winter.
    But sometimes the saint comes clothed in a brief reprise of fine weather, the “little summer of St. Demetrios”: a last blaze of gold before winter locks the villagers into their huts. October of 1940 brought such a respite to the hamlets of the Mourgana mountain range, along the northwestern border of Greece, and the villagers took advantage of it to store the autumn harvest: children gathered walnuts, men sorted over the amber and amethyst grapes for the wine making, women strung garlands of dried beans, peppers, onions and garlic to hang from the rafters. The sunshine splashed the mountainside with butter-yellow autumn crocuses, gilded beech trees rustled with ghosts, and everywhere, pomegranates, squashes and pumpkins glowed like miniature suns.
    In Athens the social season was in full swing and the Italian ambassador there, Count Emilio Grazzi, was planning an elegant midnight reception at the legation after a special performance of
Madame Butterfly
to honor the visiting son of Giacomo Puccini. The Greek royal family and the prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, were expected to attend the opera.
    In Rome, Benito Mussolini was sulking. The dictator complained to his son-in-law, who was also his foreign minister, that Hitler was humiliating him by the conquests he was making in Europe without even consulting him. It was not until three days after the seizure of Rumania that Hitler got around to writing his ally about it. “Hitlerkeeps confronting me with
faits accomplis,”
Mussolini ranted to his son-in-law. “This time I shall pay him back in his own coin; he shall learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece!”
    As the social elite of Athens moved among tables decorated with intertwined Greek and Italian flags and banners reading “Long Live Greece,” a coded