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Tassis, they said. She left two little motherless boys—grown-up now and living in Athens—but Despo’s husband was still around. I could find him outside the coffeehouse playing cards with the other men.
    When I spoke to some of the men gathered around the card tables, the tall, unsmiling figure of Stephanos Tassis rose and followed me out of earshot of the others. I told him about my interest in the war and my mother’s fate, and said that I had recently talked to a woman who was in prison with his wife.
    He showed little interest in my statement, although he told me this was the first concrete news of his wife since her disappearance thirty-two years before. He told me that their two sons had been four and two years old when everyone fled the village of Mavronoron in the wake of the invading guerrillas. But after a while the family, living as refugees in Yannina, had nothing to eat. Despo sneaked back to their village to get some corn she had hidden in their house, and was never seen again. Seven years after Despo’s disappearance, Stephanos Tassis managed with much difficulty to find a priest willing to marry him to another village woman, even though there was no proof of his first wife’s death.
    It wasn’t easy wringing answers from the taciturn man in front of me. Clearly, he had no interest in learning about Despo’s last days, so I didn’t elaborate. I could see that he didn’t want the ghost of his first wife intrudingon the life he had built for himself since the war. His eyes strayed back to the card game.
    If ever he or his sons wanted to learn more, I said, I could put them in touch with the woman who shared Despo’s imprisonment. I wrote down my address and telephone number on a piece of paper. Stephanos Tassis scarcely glanced at it as he put it in his pocket and pointedly wished me goodbye.
    I felt angry, almost personally injured, by the indifference of Despo’s husband. In my uncertainty over what to do about my mother’s death, I had sought out someone who was similarly bereaved, only to learn that not only did he intend to do nothing about his wife’s murder, he didn’t even want to be reminded of it.
    Later I would find many more victims of the guerrillas like him. In the course of hunting down the identities of my mother’s killers, I uncovered the names and addresses of guerrillas who had killed other civilians and I confronted many of their survivors with details about the murderers. In each case I was met with apathy and rationalization. “Don’t tell me where he is, because I might feel compelled to do something to him,” said a postman whose father was shot dead by a guerrilla intelligence officer as he stood in his own field and refused to inform on his neighbors. “Let God punish the guilty,” said a man who, as an eight-year-old boy, had watched his mother condemned to death for refusing to give up her children to be sent to the Iron Curtain countries. “The government should bring them to justice,” muttered a third, who saw his parents executed in the churchyard of his village while the guerrillas warned him that he would die too if he made a sound.
    These excuses kindled in me a growing disgust, rage and despair. Thousands of innocent people like my mother had been killed during the war and now their murderers were living in Greece, their sleep untroubled by fear of reprisals. Just one act of vengeance against the men who now bragged of their war exploits would have made all of them feel a little of the anguish they had inflicted on their victims. But not one father, husband or son had found the will to do it.
    My dark mood evoked by the apathy of Despo’s husband lifted a little as I drove toward my own village. Whenever I crossed the narrow bridge over the Kalamas River, which isolates the Mourgana mountains, I felt a comforting sense of returning to my childhood, of coming home.
    From the river the road leads up, past waterfalls, ruined mills and white chapels